The Possibilities Of What You Can Forever Mean To Me Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am not getting it right: my dogs are sick in Arizona,
The airplanes make fruitless love into the night:
Erin doesn’t write,
And Alma looks so far away and she will never wear dresses:
I just want to take Alma to the art museums underneath the overpasses:
I have bought dresses for Alma in the intersections of
My vagabonding childhood, which I have written and misplaced into
Novels,
But none of it feels right, even when it happens in graveyards:
You see, I know, none of this will save me: none of this will grow
More beautiful than the most beautiful weeds in the most open lips of
The most naked of cemeteries;
But I can at least buy you your lunch, Alma, and then wait for the four
Horsemen and the apocalypse with you underneath the foxtail palm trees:
And your man makes love to you,
And you forget about Mexico: and the other places that I have never been
That seem to burn brighter and larger still inside of me until my entire
College is the limpid star of a place so far away,
Ferocious and yet as beautiful as your brown skin; and I lie and bask beneath
You hemispheres, while your constellations whisper down like sparklers
On romantic holidays all the possibilities of what you can forever mean to
Me.