Saint Claire Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Houses I dream of,
Good enough for anybody out of sorts:
To move into the village by the sea
To watch the waves and my dogs lull,
To go out in the mangroves and steal the
Treasured metals of sunken conquistadors:
Listen to the banyan sway,
To lay down and write a book,
To kiss the lady on the cross
To find out what she took,
The nimble feelers out before anyone by morning,
Then when the mist crawls in penitence,
Crawls on the belly of a saint,
I might step from my front yard, hypnotized
By the lightless fall,
The twenty-four hour convenient store
Less than a minute away-
Stand before her and let my feet drench from
Her throat
From where the day before the lawnmower prowled
And trimmed her good:
I could lay down in the mausoleum of the bay
And wait for the tourists to misidentify me,
To run away on a blue pony past the cafe where
The mother works I shouldn’t know,
To wind up past the unbelievable museum,
Go down to where the surfers are passed out
In bleached dreams, tawny and sinewed,
to watch the horseshoe crabs
Cabaret: I could live here, I suppose,
For there is undoubtedly a library, and I am flush.
It would be the perfect middle class,
And I could lay down in my living room
Everyday and listen to her breathing
Infant shells from they foaming cradles, to know
That she was no longer so painfully far away,
But a convenient woman
Blowing at my door like a flower,
Lain down and mowed and trembling,
Her legs the swimming sea
At rest or in motion.