Trip The Light Fantastic Poem by Robert Rorabeck

There is no iceberg under my lines: Their enjambment
Is a rush hour of pining men, lines of silver cadavers voyaging
Into the great red forests pressing the Pacific:
Totem poles tilting in the Oregon mud, with drunk Indians
Sleeping in quaint patterns, something Delphic for their
Slaughter gods: Hemmingway will never read these things,
The pennies in the wishing well of adolescent lies, the way
First loves run together trying to irrefute the storms:
Each skipping stone lapping up to her knees, then sinking before
Her like the topaz in the orphan’s hand, her foster parents
Telling her to put it away, for it is a long drive: Intersections
Of states she can put her paws on and be four places at once,
The assembly line of rivers cutting the spine of the Grand Canyon:
Lip service for a prom queen now a real estate agent, who doesn’t
Remember how you slept in the teal courts where she played:
The greater poetesses of their times eyes wide as if for examinations,
These lines are so quaintly direct, without stamen of areolas
Exposed unlawfully in the summer parks, as the clouds swing like
A grazing herd of make-believe animals: The way they jog, my
Words make easy time, place somewhere in the middle of foreplay,
Brush their brows and drink lemonade in the shade of a civil war,
Sleep in the studio apartment with their two cats purring, while the
Sororities of naked laughing hold swim meets in the effluviant chlorine,
Fish for keys in the bowl of the lauded professors, and the revered lips
Of greater satires, the men with motes and slabs for words,
The prophets and the lead singers, dazzling them in enslaving concert,
As we snore and mew.