The Handsome Grasp Of An Overimaginative Creation Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pitch-forks in the darkened surplus of the night,
Laying in the bucolic everglades
And the hemispheres of housewives:
Alma back at home when I remembered I held her
Hand today,
And looked into her eyes after she flirted with my
Cousin for three hours,
Reminding me it was nothing:
She was wearing all of my jewelry: her body brown,
Perfect,
And could still be mistaken for a child except from
The roundness of it where it
Needed to be;
And sometimes she said she loved me:
Alma said she loved me, but sometimes she didn’t know,
And she also guessed that she loved her man;
She was going home to him, I was sure,
And she didn’t want anything to change,
For she would not leave him: and so ended the day
At the fruit market, the closing of my show:
I held her hand sometimes underneath the semi trailer
As red as marooned ixora,
And I held her hand in the car, as she turned up the volume
And remembered that she would be late picking up Michael
But at least she promised me that she didn’t love
My cousin,
Even though she flirted with him three hours today:
Maybe she loved me, this amusement she left in the sand
Burning with the instruments of defeated make believe while
The airplanes otherwise blew away their wishes
While on their destinations through the sky;
And the housewives stood in the kitchens and cooked up
Anything,
Though I held Alma’s hand today, like an unconditional make-believe
In the handsome grasp of an over imaginative creation.