Early Poems Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I will only have my early poems,
My blue period, the nights alongside the basinets
In the monte marte when the one whore showed me
Her cuneiform,
And I cut my tooth on the petrified rind:
Saw you across the fluttering windows, wasting you
Time with you tongue along side that awful man,
In the cape of whoever:
Your eyes the spittooned cloisters of a dirty park,
The pranksters and the dead prying the coffins out of
Jest: Out of that I was stymied. I couldn’t even leave
Out of my patriarch’s jail,
And it wasn’t a good time to imagine the postcards
You never send, and I made up epitaphs to the imaginary
School bus you used to drink your pints of homegrown
Milk on under the pinkish teal under-wings of herons:
And all those animals rushing out of the mammalian brush
Fires of sugarcane and rush hour stripping their
Furs and crowding into the sea, making the tourists bulk;
And there was no greater beauty than the infantile spit
In my sandbox which was used to denote your pallid
Areola, the aboveground swimming pool in the tenements
Of a desert: And here it is at hand, trying to turn twenty years
Old and not looking any better. My hand is outstretched
Showing you the key to nowhere, and the publisher is
Not accepting unrequited solicitations- so there you are.
This is a poor man’s house who can’t even afford dog food,
Who sometimes imagines the brightest azaleas all spun out
Beside Diana’s pool where all the great mothers have come
Far south to bath in and get a taste of good homeopathic
Magic; but I can’t even rightly picture that species of flower,
And mine remains the vague failure drunken on a park
Bench far too deep after midnight to be reading to anything
Brilliantly open or available for lovely romances.