The Cerulean Blanket Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I haven’t yet realized beauty: I haven’t yet done anything
Good,
Like stolen your eyes from the newspaper,
From the printed lies:
I’ve stolen bicycles and slips of moon,
Stolen kisses from my old girlfriend ten years old;
But I’ve just been rude,
And antichristian: I’ve salivated to the things you put
On your wrist- little green stars who feed hypnotized chickens,
And I love the clouds that diadem your crown
The best:
And yellow busses turn, turn, and turn, as if hypnotizing
The leaving class of students-
And I never learned where you lived in Wellington,
But when it finally got over I went to California
And failed,
Before I skipped back across the earth and settled for her,
And fell in love again down in the short-grass easements
Beside the alligators short-stacked in their canals;
And it should be almost over,
Because I am no longer in kindergarten; I no longer take
Fieldtrips to the Flagler Art Museum:
All the time travels are over, and the ladies are nakedly tired
In their bowls of framed gelatin:
Your eyes go for so many ways, so many ways back to other
Countries; but I am still hungry for fried chicken
And graveyards:
Still hungry for other women who just the same care even less for
Me-
And I will follow their sashayed skirts, into the past and in the future;
Across the stagnant traffics and orange groves,
And spikenard and airplants bloom red pistilled under the bulbous
Plumes of farting commercial airlines,
Some you will see going along the same lines across the cerulean
Blanket which covers both you and me.