The Airplane's Heartbeat Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Cold tools making sad parks,
Dredging the beds for the censers of feet
Arching while they smoke
Repeating their flight plan under all that
Deciduous shade at night-
Car horns of penny candy,
Ghosts going round, pomaded and slick
The undercurrents of the weighted hooves;
And the sky seems to do tricks;
A little boy stealing things from a cleft
A stewardess offered, the salty shoals after
The waters left: And look at those eyes,
A home,
A watery mouth, a thing that no one believed,
Wombs for hotels and infants,
Corded vines a school yard for sunbathing
Serpents,
Her promises’ accord, your lunch in a box
With lashes and seeds;
Your eyes look up to the airplane’s heartbeat:
And she told you her hand moving back and forth
Like rudder or a fin,
That the ghosts of dead travelers could only finish
What she would begin;
And you pressed your mouth to her gears under the
School bus while the sky bled heliotrope and opal,
And came into her month,
While the school emptied in a hush of shoes and
Bags; but you kept your mouth to her bush,
Moaning there the keystone wound,
Buttered marble, crying stone; and the sky held back
Sucking in its drums,
With nothing else to exclaim, until all of her mothers
Were quieted, knickknack and dusted into their
Indistinguishable homes.