To Drive Away And Work Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Souls cradle in the wishing wells of flesh:
The hot prizes picked up at fairs that wont be around again
For another eight months,
Almost time enough for you to bare me a child, Alma:
You make your nimble body embarrassed with a mulatto child:
If I could cultivate your eyes to always turn up to me,
Like the fires of kindergarten leaping up to the shoulders of its
Afternoon bus:
And we could take each other home while the sugarcane burned into
Dusk,
While the dolphins laid dreary eyes and all the paled ghosts haunted
Their ticklish suburbia:
You know I have a house for you as empty as the soul like a
Suffocating goldfish between my ribs: Alma, I have house and
A body aching to be filled with the nocturnal perfumes
That your body’s soul has to give:
Your eyes are the painless transoms of Geurrero Mexico no other
Boy from my high school has ever come close to dreaming about:
Your body is the phosphorous of an overused unicorn,
Lightning cultivated above the combing sea:
Alma, my house and my soul are empty, and you have promised to come
Tomorrow and fill them for an hour, as if I were a church,
With the slightest offering of your brown consciousness: Your skin is
So beautiful, and I promise you that I think about you at every
Opportunity, and will gladly worship you tomorrow for all the whiles
I have, before I have to drive away and work.