Tears From Prison Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I grab the crystal doorknob of your navel;
Now you are a sea-witch,
A selky, in each of your eyes inland seas;
Your body is made of deep coral or coquina,
The same stuff as the Castillo del San Marco;
And I enter you illegally and sleep in the powder magazine
Of your throat- Osceola comes in your tears and thunderstorms,
And my greatest ambition is to build a house by you
On the artificial sands piled above mangroves,
From my backdoor see through the amber shoots and the crooks
Where fisherman sleep floating on green skiffs,
Amidst drinking tubers where the dancing girl floats
With wavering eyes, now dolly of the tide, sashaying in the
Fermentations of languid immortality: John D. McDonald
Wrote about her too, just off the dirt road where you skip
Down to school- And all your things buried there up to
The neck like a hypnotized chicken in the dune: It is a buyers market-
I have on my face the imprint of sand dollars, like dark areolas
Pressed in the drool, like tears from prison;
And where I would lay down I would like to hear the sea,
Which is only a promise of you, not a contract of privateers
Or the immolations of rum: though, certainly, I hope for that as
A wind fall.
I write novels for that and send them out in symbolic bottles,
Hoping they will come back to me published for your eyes,
Gems of the enraptured senses give me metamorphosis and ride;
I could love you from pictures take of your grandparents,
I knew- And even if the world should never known my name,
In happenstance or echo, I have known yours and whispered it from
Afar, after tourism has receded like the tide, and the fort of so many
Eons lays empty except for shadows
Which sprawl like your naked body on my mind.