The Cornfield’s Daughter Poem by Robert Rorabeck

And coral snakes are in her eyes:
My God she’ll kill you
Before the sun falls-
You can leap over the canals,
Use the deadfall as bridges,
And count the nodding heads
Of lethargic crocodiles,
But she can follow you home,
Through the pines and
The owl’s hooting noose:
She can slip through walls
As easily as burnished shadows
From the tanking sun,
To reclaim the stolen pennies
From the hollow tortoise,
The remote words that sleep
In balls amidst the sugarcane-
None of slept off to school,
All of your stuff on a stick
Slung over your shoulder:
You’d thought you’d slink away
The bully’s grin,
Hiding in the masturbating pines,
Amidst the faded magazines,
The women of evening time;
But she saw you lazing there,
Like an engorged rattle-snake,
And now it is her time for the charm,
The kiss of the smoke rising in
The burning fields,
The tomboy’s slim smile,
Her ass in a pair of tight corduroys
She gives to all the lost boys:
Her metal breasts like roofs of cars
Out in the open sky all day;
You’d thought to seize her there,
And claim a pocket’s worth of
Blinding gaze, but her kiss is
A coral snake biding its time;
Ringed with the luxury of unfettered poisons,
The only thing she’ll give to you,
Blinking like the sun through pines;
She gives you the lasting courtship
Before you can run away,
And then she breezes there for awhile.