The Exegesis Of A Fairytale Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the night tending home-
After baseball- when blue lips smile
And wrists grow
Scars underneath the illuminations of swing sets-
And snails stretch out and proceed
Uphill and into a graveyard where
Grandmothers sleep perpetually who were
Once daughters and then sisters and
Then aunts or mothers-
But eventually all grandmothers underneath airplanes
And smoke signals:
Resting beside their own daughters and across
The street from the Virgin of Guadalupe-
Perpetually waiting for their husband,
As the horses eat the grass beneath them,
And the Indians echo in the foothills of sundials,
And their grandchildren continue on, laughing,
Skipping,
And going to see movies in a town an hour away:
Through the evergreens and the aspen,
Past the drunken Indian towns and flea bitten
Dogs and book stores:
Thinking about making love- of metamorphosis
Just like butterflies, to eventually travel through so many
Rainstorms, to return to the exegesis of a fairytale
And end up beside their mothers who keep
Them weeping in their arms.