Spanish For Red Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I love to put you on and do your make-up,
Spindle your hair up into a dream that grows after death:
Kiss you with curses under the race-tracks and
Mountains- Watch you, aproned, serving tourists
Ice-cream cones, like cows saltlick;
And I can’t write words that appreciate you enough,
But in general we’ve breathed the same atmosphere;
And I stamped your hand in high school with my dirty heel,
Which was some sort of absurd affection- I’m sure
You don’t remember- These things that continue to play
Out as my lonely dysfunction just due south of you:
If you read other poets, you would know the great discourteously
This is- For this is just a fit of my cuckolding, and
I can barely spell, anyways: Instead, enjoy men who can run
Fast, who might leap and dive in jaunty sport for you:
Anything you can be better sure of than this- This is but the
Curse of a lonely sort of king or grey-haired prince, unhealthy,
Having killed all the dragons to try and sough his friends from
Their weeping fangs- A curiously chivalrous orthodontist,
But otherwise an absolute novice to anything emboldened:
He who lasted twenty-nine rounds with a punchy butterfly only
To succumb in the end to the dark-eyed suppositions of an
Unpublished fairy-tale: It is true, in his fits he has climbed a great
Many mountains for you, and gone far above the stunted heads
Of a great many tourists, and looked around and wept for you,
And said to himself that there she is- she must be somewhere around;
And it is true that you are living in the only state that can
Properly reflect your beauty, where my mother was born-
Soon the aspens will be changing for your birthday; but, otherwise,
This man is such a fool- he who can barely carry a tune, who drinks
On Sundays and on swing-sets, who looks for you everywhere he
Can think of, thinking yes you must be somewhere nearest to him,
But you are never anywhere found.