The Smallest Bit Of You Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Your fingers have touched me some how;
They have set off on their own and hitchhiked
To my aching flesh just to brush me once and leave,
As that’s all they could do, those gauzy beings
The smallest bit of you that cared. The rest of
You did not even know, where you sailed like
A merchant’s fair ship through the day, the
Channels of sidewalk moving you easily, your
Loose garments lapping flesh and light together.

Your lips did not know—
They did not come so far to kiss my lips, to speak
Warm words into my ear to ring inside my listening eyes,
To make my nervous body begin to burn with that pale brush on my soul.
Nor did your sculpted legs move you close to me, like silky
Pistons moving your fleeting thoughts upon an ephemeral
Track hidden in the forests and deserted shopping
Malls across the desolate states of the nation, jogging
The starry course of boarders real and imagined to
My homestead at 8,000 feet.

Your lips did not take off like rosy biplanes to
Come bombing me with kisses while I sat outside and
Read and stared out across the valley where Molly’s Nipple rises,
Looking for those parts of your body that might come that way,
Like parts of angels playing silent instruments the final
Gifts of God’s artistry, a mob of your lashes, hairs, and breasts—
These things of you did not come marching down from the pink nebulous
Like pulsating bees in swarms to sting and swell me,
And blister my tongue from visions of you in parts
Laying and spread across the harlot’s open sky.

Though your fingers came, little thieves, and brushed me only to
Leave before I could understand, the way those fleshy
Daggers worked into me, like an infant’s need. A contented ease they stole away,
And in that place a vast and heavy longing lies, an icy mountain
That knows how to crawl through all of my body, from tip to tip,
And there quaking movements bring upon heated landslides in
Thoughts of you crashing down and fumbling like uneasy lovers on me.

For your fingers left their prints in my heart,
Marks in stone, the smallest bit
Of you who never even realized.