The Fourth World Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I saw the parade of envious dreams
Board the colorless ship with fish bone
Sails and the tigers the color of cold amber,
The way you looked up from the
Other side of the glass as it began to rain
To where things began to move across
The empty sea, and you tried to breathe,
Like distant people lighting up momentarily
To hold each other and failing, so the
World opened up to the great things
Feeding near the bottom, and I watched
My infancy go down the maelstrom, the
Animal’s screams like a ship full of slaughtered infants
Somewhere far across the world where
Everything was the same as this neighborhood,
Destroyed, the prophecy stood fulfilled,
And from the thrashing waves raised the great totem
Of the drunken Indians dead in the gutters of the reservations,
At the apex the wisest of the Hopis beat their breasts
To the dying of the fourth world.