The Lips Of Their Daughters Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Rum moves through this body; it puts the scars to sleep
Like anchovies softly breathing over the flesh:
It gives girls I know lighthouses to feel with valuable clothes,
And it brings other girls to them like sailors all shampooed
In the washing machines and their caesuras:
And in the middle of their fieldtrip of good smelling caracoles,
A rock garden on an island under a golden moon:
A rock garden filled with lucky rabbits and their mothers,
And rattlesnakes that don’t care to move; and little blond boys
Like the vermilion shadows of who I used to be,
Before I knew or understood any beautiful young girls, or
Tried to steal from them all that they had to see: And all around
The rock garden a forest so new that it really couldn’t be said to be,
But like the blueprints of white shadows leaping fast above the
Sea,
Like a playground swaying this way for you, and that way for me;
And the words on the bodies who are not there, but who have evaporated
From their seats in class: their eyes wandering the forest of this
Albino overpass- Where orchards live as neighbors in fleets so sweet
And strong, and even the girls on airplanes passing through the sweet
Smelling bowers, telling thousands of stories as the candles burn,
Just so that they don’t have to sleep at night with other kings: Just so
That their lips can put the night away before the night, and make daylight
An ever living thing: The squid of a captain over the seals and dolphins,
Over all the muses who have crippled my pen, areolas weeping like
Ukuleles for the lips of their daughters, just as for their imaginary princes.