The Youngest Of All Of Alma's Young Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Bodice at the windowsill,
Bodice at the sea: starting at a poem this way,
Remembering the white cliffs of those bucks
Who now diadem the whitewashed walls of her admirers
And Tom Sawyer,
The boys that had to drown to learn how to fly:
And all of the drafts before this, in all of their pettiest of ways:
The way that the dog barks along the lonely clefts of high altitude
Though abandoned highways:
And now even all of the school rooms could teach me this,
As I am still teething like a fox after his luscious grapes,
Like a paper airplane folded over the cealing fans over the graveyards:
Something that is hardly worth remembering,
Something that has many numbers but not a single name:
While in the fruit market Alma told me that, yes, she did love,
But just as readily bent back down into her familiar game:
She comes from Mexico, and speaks a languid only lightly
Brushed my tongue,
But now I know that I will not survive without her, for now is the deadest
Of all of the weathers,
And I find that I am absolutely the youngest of all of Alma’s young.