The Housewives And Their Canals Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The houses in make-believe rows, even if they run away
Do not get too far from here:
They are stopped by another road or a canal- the latchkey
Children cry mucus down their pale bone
Steps,
And the dogs kill the rabbits on Easter or on
Domingo de Pascua- the housewives try to run away
To see the resurrections:
Then the airplanes guide them like stars: first over one
Canal, and then across the other,
While the conquistadors who were once young men
Lay up to their feebled chins in the dunes
Grown over with aloe and spikenard:
And the day chimneys, the birds in her all a rile-
But the housewives go down on all four legs, leaping into another
World, changing dresses and their last names;
The houses of their abandoned families hunting them
While the blue gills in the canals look up their skirts.