What I Had To Say Poem by Robert Rorabeck

After lunch, I crawled underneath the
School bus and cried into an oil slick,
That I was not an author, and that I had been
Accused unfairly of plagiarism.
Out behind the portables which schooled the
Overflow, the old spinster of a withered bard,
Scolded me by the wrist, even though I
Told her with my dower eyes that I might explain;
That there certainly was a passage by Don Quixote
I had misquoted, but might find again.
Towering over us, the windmills swam with arms of
Propeller blades, and I sweated as she let me go,
Like a fish, and afterwards, then, I took to the
Hallways, hoping to be persuaded anew by the auburn
Goddess, but when I saw her there, taken breathless,
She only passed me by; and after all these years I
Have not forgotten how she passed me by, or her eyes
Sensed her body through the motes beyond younger men:
And so, inexcusably, I tend to the weeds, and turquoise
Dragonflies nipping at buds, the tenderloin-infant stings.
Like a page turned in an overdue book, I pretend to
Brush her thigh, and these are the things I say,
Which I have not stolen, but borrowed the recipes of,
And the spinster in her grammary dusk continues to
Parcel on the parts of speech, in such a gloomy way that
The country all recedes around her, as she never heard at all
What I had to say.