What They Were Named Anyways Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Flowers who close their blue eyes at night,
Stems who quiver like strings and the wind the bow:
I have seen you there sleeping too,
The sky a fire of untouchable passion, and the waves beside
You, like dogs beckoned to your knees:
And right now you are for real in the tall grass, shoeless,
Spectacle of anemic crosses in your ears;
And maybe tiny lights come on above you in the fiberboard,
And the ceiling fans spin like the roulette wheels
Of domesticated hallucinations:
Your new tattoos curl across the overpass of your ankle,
And your husband sleeps beside you too:
The bb gun is propped up in your oldest child’s room;
And they all dream of differently similar things than you:
This is your family in the wildfire grotto of your eyes,
Unperceiving, though breathed from your womb;
And I have tried so many times to justify myself to you,
Waking up, yawning and kidnapped with new scars and complexes:
The high rises fall like penitent sinners, and you close your eyes,
Though your eyes were already incredibly far away;
And new men come toward you repeatedly, allowing you to either
Pass or exit;
But your marriage remains in the tall grass that you stepped barefoot
Through, nearing the rattlesnake in its semipermiable cocoon:
I waited for it to strike you, but it only reached out as if it had
Lips,
And it kissed the flower on your ankle, and from its unpromised
Poison,
The butterfly resumed while you were sleeping, and the stars twinkled,
And divided like the mitosis of starfish,
Which is what they were named after anyways; and which is what
You are.