What She Might Say Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Insouciant feelings for me,
Like she doesn’t know what to eat:
She might love me for an hour,
She might love me for a week,

But she always comes back to him,
Like a philanthropic uncle patronizing her
Disabilities,
If her leg bleeds in its stigmata of cicadas
And mantis,
He will put the lucky balm on it,
He will,
He will,
And she will say his name like a monosyllabic
Prayer,
And she will heal:

I think about her by the hours spinning in
My bed. The earth pirouettes on her axis, like
A morbidly obese savant of space,
And she whispers throughout the shades of light
Flickering like a dragonfly’s static prance
Before my eyes- Like water rippling from a
Faucet where her lips overspill,
And places the cleaned dishes on the sunlit windowsill:

Out in the yard, the leaves are
Curling in dusk,
And the bicycles lie like unearthed fossils and rusting,
And sometimes for an hour or so,
She sits on the innocuous porch of cinder blocks,
And lets her fingers drag the cigarette to her claret lips;
Sometimes like these, while the earth dances,
And her diffuse eyes wander away,
She gets lost in her thoughts of who I might be,
And if she saw me tomorrow, what she might say....