Swimming My Tomorrows Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The ocean is so close to me,
As if this overpass were a cradle:
The earliest stars are like her eyes to me,
And her lips an offering ladle;

The waves, they leap so far towards me,
As if they were women standing feverishly from a bath,
And the clouds the curtains half torn down,
From the sky’s impassioned aftermath,

And in the mangrove where the turtles slow,
The roots of trees her knees at rest,
The fallen leaves her scattered memory,
Flowing waywardly in the torpid currents over spilling
In the sea,

Where she goes, the rivers lead,
Where she seeps, the current swallows,
In my eyes the closest memory, through jetsam’s intercostals,

The sands are moribund and slipping along her neck,
Her breasts the dunes and hillocks,
Seabirds flight upon her breasts, and bury thistles
In her navel,

I could listen to her all day, wantonly breathing beneath
The humid skyways,
But she would not lay her eyes to me, for they are lain
Upon the vessel which strokes full steam along her memory,
And the men who walk it are white and capital;

She foams as she wreathes, pushing the porpoises
Along their bow and stern, just like little children playing
In the tub, squeaking and clean,
I guess she’ll never learn,

That when I looked upon her so long ago,
I swallowed her most entirely, and now when she leaps
Away, naked and ephemeral, I am drowning naked in her
Swaying caesuras,
Hypnotized by the epiphany of her unclothed torso,

Which flips just like a dream in an underwater midway,
First in the thirsty sky, then in the salty stream,
Jaunting fast and shallow,
She can hardly remember who I was, but she is forever
Swimming my tomorrows.