Baby Blue Behind Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Diana is the goddess of the hunt and in her
Lunch truck, talking all the time on the phone, she has
Amble beauty:
She magnetizes the earth, and she has tried on the baby blue
Lingerie I bought for her, because she wanted me to
For her birthday;
This weekend will be my birthday, and all I want to do is take
Her and her daughter to the zoo,
To touch the same animals all at once, to feel the same existence:
To make the mermaids jealous in their topless pools,
And to look at my aunt’s derelict car parked in the irresponsible
Forest in which a careless cigarette has already started a cheerless
Fire;
And if we can find some swings that are high enough for the playgrounds
Of Diana’s body,
We can pretend to fly in the censer’s arc: with her daughter,
We all can be glorious waves over the graveyard, and we can laugh
While the traffic checks us out,
And all the boys and all the men there swear that they have seen a goddess
Swimming over them on their drive home,
Something they can search forever for afterwards but never find,
When it was only Diana humoring me on my birthday,
Though ever after even I know she will be almost impossible to find,
The common reason for our male truancies, swinging with
A baby blue behind.