Sympathetic Revelries Poem by Robert Rorabeck

No one’s reading Sylvia Plathe,
But maybe its because the oven’s baked the pie,
As outside the twins swing upside down
From each bough on the starfruit tree;
Once inside, the house will get up and walk
Away fulfilled, for at night its windows
Saw the folklore tangled around the rock garden
The rabbits died in by the disease of the pet werewolf;
That was before the sun came up and reformed
The boldness on the dunes, where soldiers
Practiced with the tortoise who got lost
When her lover blindfolded her and asked her
To get out of the bath; That day was the end
Of my grandparents, for she saw him kissing
The teller at the bank, and she bought an inflatable
Raft and slept near the hair-lip of the canal, in
The ditch she dug; The alligators came to her
With boxes of chocolates and Robert Frost poetry,
but she decided to be a spider-webbed ingénue,
And I built her a theatre from the fox-destroyed
Chicken-coop, and cut snowflakes to hang as I died,
Shot through by arrows slung off-stage by my
Little sister in a blond-wig chewing bubble gum;
My grandmother applauded, and I leaked
Ketchup. Afterwards, we made a cairn on a steamboat
And turned the canal into the Mississippi for the
Evening, and set grandmother out while even then
He was laying a busty new woman like a cat on
A fence; thus another line bled into the next, and grandmother
Set out above the debutants and manatees; I am
Certain if she saw a mermaid on her way to the Atlantic,
She would have wept, as we rose from the dead and saw
Her off, applauding her with our sympathetic revelries.