The Hair Lip Parade Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My father has an orchard
He wont let anybody see.
He loves horses in his orchard of the colors
Of the likes horses are
Never allowed to be,
And I still my father’s limes from the back of
His truck;
I break my jaw and have it wired shut along
I-95 to stave of scurvy:
I am like a color t.v., the very first time,
And we turn our broadsides around in
The venal sea
And fire off our green copper cannons to ward of
Coral snakes and selkies,
And the banshees from the bushes and the entangled
Colonnades;
And there was a person she knelt for beneath the wrought iron
Cross, like a gate strangled by ivy,
And maybe she was the first woman whose birthstone
Was opal to walk free and unadulterated through this
State,
Through the great inland prairies,
And the apple orchards, through the Bismarcks,
And the slash pine teepees the white men eventually made
Telephone poles out of:
And through the tennis courts of a teal man’s pride,
I touched myself and dreamed I had her for a bride,
And picking her up took her to an expensive zoo,
Down the corridor of well placed gentlemen all in soft
Green,
We stole on through the flame swords and the softly
Beating serpents and I made love to her first with my
Right hand and then
With my left, as I was meant to do,
Down on the soft green carpet of the giant living room
Of my father’s orchard
Or somewhere else I didn’t belong:
But it was full of secrets, and the leaping shadowed bodies
Of airplanes,
Paper and crenulated and folded along the wrist,
Spuming the choreographies of the forgotten generation
Who sunk the entire cavalry of German U-boats
And then went straight on into the next
Television show, college graduation,
And the hair lip rodeo.