The Gifts They Never Knew Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There is a brown thimble in my soul:
It goes beating- beating porous- letting the blood and
Feelings through:
There are the rinds of acrobats in there too:
Curling, curling up the ladders that drew
The sun and the moon
As they walked their constant avenue- lovers in the grove,
And the spaces between two bodies that undress
And then pass dousing into rivers:
I suppose there must have been a fight, but I crossed myself
And went down and became homeless underneath the open wounds
Of her soul:
Her name: Alma, Alma, water beating in the man, tears on
The open bellies of asphodels as customers come in:
Wanting- wanting her too: but all that she has sung echoes
And she says she can only want for one man:
Not me- not me, but he who bore both of her children:
And I want to die, as the stag crests the saddle
On the valley overlooking the cemetery my grandmother receded
In- and it feels for a long while that I will not know her before
I sleep,
But I keep to the pinpricks of my veins, saying things that are awful
And scarred, as the traffic returns and the weathers:
The airplanes touching down like Indian feathers, stealing away with
Breaths and cheeks the gifts they never knew.