Taking Their Own Turns Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tired eyes of daydreams: and I think it is going to rain,
As the cars eventually stop as we have to stop making love:
And the armadas cool plasticine in the toy oceans of their hobbies
And then it gets okay to believe:
Especially in the Appalachians, the bodies moving in the organized
Masses like the sororities of feathers in the chief’s headdress:
Even while everything else that never had to be, doesn’t have to move:
And we drink our glasses until there are ghosts:
And I have to admit that there never actually was roses outlining
The beauties bicycling to and from the university:
And this is why you hired me this way: to be your own private eye
As the rains came over the limestone that were digging their own
Graves:
The sinkholes who liked the idea of discovering something, leaving
Their whitewashed girlfriends behind in their restaurants,
And practicing, and practicing like their favorite baseball teams:
Even while the cannibal and the bluest of the jays ate their own
Song, flattering their wings like the blowing out of candles
Across and through the erudite passes lining
The cadmiums and velvets of their very own graves:
Like lovers who left love notes of their open throats: for themselves,
Alma- in which you are likened to me:
And we sing this way, passing our breaths through the singsongs and
Wishes of awake and sleep: loving you openly through the brashness of
Classrooms that glow their own ways, like casinos of souls who
Open themselves up on Sundays, and then turn around like school busses
In a honey sweet apiary, taking their own turns at kissing themselves.