The Nudity Of A Drowsy Opulence Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Crowns in the passionate grass, kindling lost love
Letters to the paper airplanes
Who no longer have any unction to fly away:
They just look up at her skirts as she resurrections,
As she crowns:
Grapes on the vines of consumptive professors, and other
Words than these, curling up their unmolested shoulders:
Hooded, poisonous,
And they will go around campus sucking their thumbs,
Remembering and petulant on the bruises,
While the prettier girls will stay out all night, serving their
Drinks across from the Catholic church and having their
Fancies until the ghosts and the orchards grow fat;
And the forts next to the sea pregnant with moonlight
Fill out.
And it all becomes desirably surreal, the beaches peppered with
Tortoises making their abodes for the night in the sandy hotels
That will become transformed and be speckled with their
Love,
Which the gulls so love, turning gyres and sad, lousy tricks:
Getting down to the anemones, and basking in the nudity of
A drowsy opulence.