The Tall Gentlemen Shading Briar Rabbit Poem by Robert Rorabeck

What is Alice doing,
Thumbing her pink
When all the cars are driving to Pie Town?
She better hurry up,
And siphon out that gas,
Because the hay-days are coming:
Vroom! Vroom!
How will she ever get to the Emerald City
In those shoes?
Frank L. Baum never got to the fifteenth novel
Of Oz, but we forgive him,
Because he let us see the ruby heart beating in
The glass cat.
Now all the palm trees are swaying like flamingo
Dancers at the Ritz,
And my scars are tinsel on a Christmas tree,
Or the sawdust under the Cowboys’ spurs riding bulls
In Gainesville until they get drunk,
And are thrown in the coolly overnight,
While the ghosts work in Detroit,
And each wave is ringing her doorbell,
Because they have brought the corsages for the prom,
But she is not home,
And still here they come, the cerulean cavalcade
In blue collars and coats,
The proletariat rowdy in their salt,
They’ve perfected the guillotine, and the pink
Mohawk,
And grandmother is clubbing the rattlesnakes behind
The plough,
Clubbing the rattlesnakes,
As we are taking the rum down river in the trunks of
Our Hudsons, me and dad,
Who is also an ornithologist in the Phoenix desert
Where I’ve seen him standing as still as a hummingbird
All day between the columns of sequoias,
The tall gentlemen shading Briar Rabbit,
Watching his subject as perfectly as the bird is watching
Him, in a studious dream,
Which was how I concluded my novel today
A little after noon,
But will it ever be published? Will she ever know what
It is to see a Utopia spoken by the feral tongue
Of an individual truism, for the first and last time.