The Oil Rig's Birthday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Virulent glade, open for me- and wear
Your green stars about your wrist: Smile summertime,
And swing your hips,
Knowing I will never succeed:
I am just counting coup in a field of atomic sport-
I’m using a dead art to fight the new angelic fireworks;
I’m leaning back and closing my eyes into the
Siamese headed lion
With all the chlorinated kindergarteners sticking
Tiny fists into their mouths, not knowing if I should succeed:
I’ve put my keys on the as$ of a kite and sent it
Sailing in all sorts of your domestic weathers,
Waiting for you to slash my hopes, to send me popping
All over the mercy seat and then the bag:
I am doing all of this like a legless ballerina out in a somnolent
Parade in Saint Augustine, not even knowing she’ll never
Be picked,
Not even knowing her mother is lying even now under the
Just transplanted rose bushes;
And the conquistadors proceed like zinc and copper cenotaphs,
And the priests sell candles for two cents,
And it is the oil-rig’s birthday just bathing there like a stilted
Butterfly house;
I sell ice-cream and hotdogs to stave off the impenitent dreams-
When I once thought she would emerge freshly brindled from
The sea- But she doesn’t come-
I once saw her drive by very fast in a new car with her man,
But she never looked my way;
And the windmills turn, all sorts of them, smiling like Queen
Anne- the royalty who know but never speak your name.