Watch Me Dance Poem by Robert Rorabeck

In the still-life she draws to try
And save animals,
Those flowers are not real,

Though to her lips the beer froths,
The yeast of a microbrewery tattooed
On her left breast,
And the nun looking up, and the sparrow
Above that:

When the winter is in the finest nudity,
She steals Robert Frost,
And breastfeeds him in the empty hutch
Where she choreographed the rabbits all summer;

All this afternoon I used to think
She could be my wife, if I brought her to church,
Where I watched her in the dim suicide pictures
In the surf,

But it turns out that she laid her wrists
Across the earth like a handcuffed angel off to
Disney World, and French Guiana, and let the machetes
Clear the deadfall of her junior year,

She wanted to save the earth, but the doctors
And their priest kept her medicated, and in the Nor’easter
She took off her blouse and came on to Dorothy,
Until they were both picked clean and carried off to
The South of France.

Now that ends the story. Watch me dance.