The Vast Wind-Tunnel's Void Poem by Robert Rorabeck

She drinks; she:

Drinks in a velvet cushioned confessional;
Has ideas strung out under the cerulean cones in
An old forest where copper antlers lay shed;
Passes the bottle around decrepit birdbaths where
Bald tires are disposed of, where winged metamorphosis
Farts chirping;
Lanks in Navajo flea markets, buys fry bred;
screws together plywood to sell fireworks;
Erects tents like giant skirts without any animals;
Doesn’t read- can’t read; swings;
Is undoing herself in stony riverbed- The fish are
Scared but not harmed-
The water is veined spittle; the water is cheap gold when
It leaps; filthy, deluded liquors
Flaked in homeopathic minerals- and it is swell, and sometimes there
Are mountains too, at the deluge’s vacillating head-
And distant roads always leading into the sky of
Lighted fires, as if the clouds are
A smoky cauldron bubbling in spell;
Down cold, winsome ways with
Stranded uptight houses and petulant windmills-
Doesn’t think she should go- her legs are sore already,
But in time will go there,
Past where the steeped valleys lay deepest green, and runny,
And always damp;
Far above the bathes of crooked trees,
Fine-spun angels like flimsy vagrants are playing, cavorting with the
Stinging sport with other things that she can’t
Be sure are there- to graveyards of miners
Summited in loose scree, hidden amusements of microscopic
Life, circuses of hardy mice
And centipedes evolved from the
Salt of the evaporated sea; and there to listen down through the vast wind-tunnel’s
Void, to the lonesome men making love, she used to make love
To; going down weeping, backlit by Saturn’s snowball rings;
Stores are closing far away,
But the mortal light yet dying streams; exhausted but sure
She has both seen and heard
A divinity she before fought to disprove.