With The Beautiful Species You Employ Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Your lips are beginning the fine creases of a
Distinguished grandmother, which is no insult-
I have never kissed them, but sung of them by my
Own lips, the insecure choices you will never hear;
Perhaps, I will drink a bottle of Lysol next
Summer, and go the way of Vachel Lindsay when the
Aspens are still green, their bodies reminding me
Of you swaying like a wave in a varnished hallway,
And then as a ghost I will sleep in the dimples of
Your pottery, and know those things about you no one
Could describe; and enter those things like an old Spanish
Fort, your lovely narcissisms, the roots your flesh
Enfolds your blood like Spanish wine- Only then I would
Know the ways. Though sleeping on some sad hill underneath
The cold crosses, the chicken wire strewn through the
Plenitude of corpse weed; I might then be considered fully
Formed, and go about you bathing as if in the reservoirs
Of a crustacean, preferring the tributaries you most often
Employ, running along the appendages of your carriage
Like light slipping down through the bay windows of a
Living room- For otherwise I will know nothing of your off-colored
Crèches,
Like lamplight which cradles your child,
kindled by your elegant lashes; and I am lazy and play no sports,
But wrestle all day in the arid basins where your perfume
Wafts like lavender pollens, or the descriptions of species
That you would know better, having petted and fed them along a
Path I have only come to in passing, struggling through the boreal
Scars; and, not invited upon, never learned to speak French,
Having to sleep under the leaky guts of school buses during lunch
Time,
You already in a deep esoteric conversation,
Like in a fairytale’s trance with the beautiful species you employ.