The Canals Of Venus Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Contraptions of unpaid for love are
Ambling hurdy-gurdy across the endless desert;
The background of her skull, turned away,
Another rhyme misled into the mouth of the crocodile
Playing in the placid mauve estuary of the unambiguous sky,
With the other toys the witches bring quite invisible
In their hearth of wicker winds,
The stone bridge with the arc of a traveling worm,
Leaps the dry riverbeds where the vertebrae of cotton mouths
Sleep, their poisonous drool now just clay scimitars out of reach;
The day ends with the cloistered shove of another day,
Brighter than the other day and ready for his audition on
The cracked and pitted stage, with more behind him in a narcissistic
Queue of reptilian talents;
Those lines she never reads or looks at without crossing her eyes,
The ghost towns of auburn boys haunted by her ceaseless sway;
They work for her beneath the monolithic fossils of glintless rust,
Struggling to keep up with the migratory shadows,
Those tools of groaning herbivores who trundle the elusive paths,
Between the sunburned crests and troughs,
The serpentine illusions she uses to stuff her bra,
The red skin she dyes her lips on, the diminished veldt she lays out
Upon, a python of incomparable absences;
Judging how the day looms its cauldron overhead,
Laughing at the lumbering procession of defiant fossils,
The children of a ceaseless world, the remains of the boys
Pray beneath and dream of Eucharist and sips of wine from paper boxes;
They look up at her with apocryphal reverence;
Though coiling, they are to her the ants from a mound of inconsequential existence,
As the brighter men parade their bulbous pomp above her apathetic eyes.