The Tomb Of Your Hands Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the tomb of your hands,
I look up into highways-
Luminescent creches
Built in the plane language of your dinoflagellates-
These are words I cannot describe or spell,
Accumulating in evaporations over the hills of
Your Chinese ancestors:

The professionals are taken low,
Redressed into the Formica growing underneath
The glass boundaries of ant farms-

My sister buys a new house and smiles towards the sun-
Her god addressed here in the innuendos of our father-

Hear the airplanes entertaining the angels.
Take another drink and they become hostages for giants
And then their wives:

And I have not seen you in my sleep for many years now.
My health is taken down from the mountain
And has become so forgetful that I can no longer tell its
Fairytales to my children:

Conjoined twins in a bed of aspen sprigs.
The mountain's lactates feed them her minerals-
Their eyes tell me of a gypsum catastrophe,
As the great valley beckons, opening into widening
Prairies where the buffalo run downstream,

Gather into the traffic jam, and the detritus of beaten waves,
Stacked into the leg-splinter of the so many things which
Can no longer run.