The Pretty Directions Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Now it happens to be that I found myself for
The first time in the last modern gold rush: even if
It wasn’t real,
The way sometimes butterflies arent very real as they
Advertise their paper thin migrations
Over the truck stops,
Calling home with the strange cries of nothingness-
Ululating like the prickly pears in the armpits of cactus
To the bosques of Mexico where
Alma once lived and walked the same paths as the dangerous
And copper backed snakes
That live there: and she didn’t have there her own football team,
Or Disney World,
And what she thought behind the deep mysticisms of her
Unthinkable eyes, I will never know:
But Hoodini died on Sunday, which is the day after tomorrow
And Halloween; and if I will ever contact him again
I do not know,
But I have so many pumpkins left to sell, while Alma sleeps
Curled up in her brownness with her family in a little house not
So far away;
And even though I am amputated from her, I am close-
And crawling towards her still with the uncanny jubilees of my show-
My own soul burning in filigree and birds feathers
Understanding that her address is in its reach, and obtainable,
Even while this body bleeds the mortal wounds of a stigmata
Whose indications and weather forecasts are directed
Always too often by the pretty directions that her pretty two legs
Go walking.