The Mirages Of Her Gifts Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She laughed at me when
I wouldn’t show her my face in the morning
When I came to visit her and
Slept on the couch,
Instead of bedding with the lesbian,
And now I love her...
But there are more sinkholes under the highway,
And it is snowing in May,
In the white mountains where my dogs howl for
A long time, fearing the unburied bones of
The drifters in the train yards,
The phone calls left unanswered every night,
Even when eyes can see the numbers,
The solicitors of easy freshman.
Carly said that you didn’t want me to know
How you had a boyfriend who played the guitar, and I thought
I was special when we took photographs together
In her bedroom,
But I was just average,
Because she doesn’t really want any man to know
Who she is doing, creeping through her window
Like radioactive spore,
Like the mists in a monster movie filling a miniature bay,
Like a luminescent dragon which ate all of China,
Eats her like rice and wontons,
Her flesh like sushi still dripping the salt water,
Her lips the keystone in the rocks the wind moans through,
Her legs open like a broken exercise:
There it is: the truth of hidden Oregons,
Making me take drugs with two years left
In high school, to drive home alone with trails
Of wild eyes, to frighten my sisters,
To sleep in my knocking caves,
And eventually leave me where I am now, bastardized
In high altitude, drooling like an idiot
For her Catholic legs, her knees like collection plates
For the successful foreplays of knotting boyhoods....
If she were a lawyer, I could refuse and sleep naked
In another meadow,
But because she is not I want to be naked beside her
In bed, but the profession is occupied by a silent gentleman,
And it has been so very long since I have entered
The steaming cracks of Yosemite’s sorority,
That it makes me want to bight my lip and pay by the hour
To get things done and out of me like target practice,
All the little ghostly children released from school,
By the bell and the moaning psalms,
But this is clearly some reality, and I am no rock star,
No poet,
No millionaire:
Just a little bit of man crawling through the desert,
Looking for the waters of survival she has fun
Flaunting in the mirages of her gifts.