The Wide Open Correspondence Of The Sweet Young Earth Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Drink while you’re awake-
And don’t forget to spell, or bring your love
Bouquets.
Soon it will be science-fiction: soon it will
Be unreal.
She’ll be a unicorn- narcoleptic in an office
Building; she’ll be a literary agent for romance
Novels,
And I can only remember that I am doing this
Because I have seen my reflection in the mirrors
Of so many humid rest-stops
In states I had never been to; and to tell the
Truth, pirates are really beautiful with candles
Burning in their beards,
Even after they’re captured and garroted and
Made an example of, they are still beautiful-
Even if every last one of my novels should fail,
I can still cross the low bridges where soft-shelled
Tortoises are sleeping, escaping from the zoo:
Haven’t they, and the wildlife is so close, and the
Fact that they have pin-ball makes it all right and
Quite beautiful that you are out of work, and scarred,
And not made for friends- You have three decades
And a record and you are just now getting around to
Reading The Jungle Book- Cheap rum does this to you,
Makes you soliloquy sugar cane fields and comets
Newly tossed from planets where her venereal diseases
Are still burning: The paciderms still remember
The otherworldly hemispheres, every roller coaster
In the world where the gunpowder sweethearts, the
Girls from antebellum cannons are still roaring,
And like naked waves they go exploring mindless,
Like the things you think to feel from the roots of your
Finger-prints:
Your short lived pets, dogs and foxes, querulous friends,
Noses pressed to the dirt of dead ancestors,
Tails wagging to go and explore the wide open correspondence
Of the sweet young earth.