Theory To My Devotion - Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If I could write anything let it be you in the cathedral,
Hemmed in blue, holding the pet turtle:
Someone has punched you on the lips, I know not who,
But your pain and bruises only serve to make you
More beautiful;
Unseen, the saints descent and, gossiping, lend you
Their halo, but
Already your legs go echoing, and you leave the door open,
Letting the leaves and wind through.

Postscript: I have become an America citizen, and eaten
The sweetmeats of unforgotten caribou,
And when I go through Wisconsin with my window down,
Letting the storm and rain in, I care to think about you,
And how if you are now so near another man, watching his
Brow furrow,
How can I stand so close to you, and listen to your absence,
And study how freckles pattern your cheek bones, and thus
Levitate when you grin, captivated by the Olympics.

For now it seems as if you should be holding me, curious
Of my recluse; as if Mary in her Pieta kneeling in the fertile grotto,
Feeding me bottles of wine, and the fatty breast while watching
The hopes of the Spaniard’s armada dashed like domestic violence
On the impolite shoals,
Like blistered knees of little girls, if I hold your eyes’ candled in
The darkness, would you walk corporeal to me in the fluid apoplexy
Of a rainstorm‘s kinetics,
Your legs the philosophy of universal motion without a constant,
Your pumping organs the antecedent, a theory to my devotion.