The Courtesy Bays Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Weep in a field.
The airplanes are its flying sorority.
My wife is playing the guzheng. She wants our son to learn
The violin.
I watch a movie about Emily Dickinson.
Today it rained, hard at times and then a roar of sun-
Our air-conditioning is not cooling.
I sold 3,000 dollars today to survive and, periodically,
Become rich:
It is a nice form of revenge against no one who cares.
If there are any left-over muses,
They are comfortably married-

The pockmarking teachers and abusive faculties are retired
Or are retiring,

A tourist of Disney World scratches his armpit-
It is the only real smelling thing he will experience all day:

There is a preternatural world of has-been Indians beneath him,
Cadavers caracoled In a rotted archaeology;
While the stewardesses control the wishes of his gods-

And the heat settles across the phallic peninsulas,
Evaporating waves before they can rise:

Mermaids are getting headaches or amnesias:
It is their time of the month-
They want us to lay off:

There is Mara Largo across the courtesy bay: When nineteen, , mistaking it for the
Coral Castle, I tried to enter in
At midnight and armed guards came out of the floodlights,
Guns raised.
I raised my arms and ran off.
They had moved the Coral Castle to Homestead,
Saddled against the Everglades.

This is the home we have made for ourselves:
Old Edward Lee- has given up-
His Egyptian love is hardly anymore than a curiosity:
Pythons are eating alligators in the swamp-
Strange fruit is swinging from the poplar trees- -

It is a stretch of a tropical fairytale, forever building but never
Taking us above sea level:
In a make believe where societies distinguish themselves from
The proletariatry behind faux gilded gates,
Gaudy facsimiles made to look like old Romany-

The palms splay to receive the heat given off from the black tops.
To the east nearby, the caesuras do their hidden things,
Hypnotizing and make us forgetful of the loves that have not returned to me.