To Be Alone Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Drowning in this life underneath the overpasses:
The working girls smelling like marbled steak and marbles:
Her hands like pigeon’s feathers, dirty with fealty:
How will she answer to my mouthing wonder for her duel pregnancies:
Or that when far a field we make love, she always wants something,
Her sisters following behind her like a family of possums:
They live in one room beside her, and she beside them, and the night
Comes and wonders and brings down the hummingbirds
Of helicopters:
The lions seem to freeze in midair with their dirty tricks while the fires
Burn out, and the shoulders of the trapeze grown naked:
And then Alma is just this, a wounded child without a bicycle
Who I have spent all of my wishes on,
And time meanders and the rivers overflow and steal away children:
And houses crumble and lose their affluence through the
Corn fields:
And all of Mexico rises up and presses its lips to bullfinches of
Copper horns- and then there is a victory through the maze of solitude-
And maybe my soul realize in its wonder that it should no longer have
To be alone.