Something To Lie Down In Bed With Alone Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I’ve saved up my life
To spend it all at once,
To live in poverty
In the diseased fields where
Coral snakes create patterns in the soul,
Where my aunt throws spit in my mouth
And steals my only dollar bill,
Before she runs off to get married
And then divorced:
In the crops of unrecognized fortune,
Following my grandfather’s hand,
I try to find her naked in the trees
After nightfall,
Perhaps crawling up to my room
To say nothing,
To speak like a sorrowful owl
Before it lights off in the enjoyment
Of small quick shadows from the barn.
I have seen her,
Like a speckled fawn out amidst
The furrows, eating our produce,
Before my relatives scared her onward
Into the solitary line of cypress
Across the highway.
In the morning, only her footsteps
Stand still under the Old Testament’s sun.
As we reap what was sown,
There is not enough time to go after,
In the mottled afternoon of meandering worth,
Across the overgrown ditches,
The unclaimed land
Of insects and weeds,
The over fertilized estuaries ripening
Where I wonder of her doings,
Free and without a language,
Eating the blooming things before
They get too persistent,
Never suspecting all that I ever saw there
When she stepped out onto the land,
And in that necessary action gave to me
Something to lie down in bed with alone.