Fuerte Del Diablo Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I am smiling because
Her eyes are green, and just beginning to
Open- How so like the migratory song of the butterfly,
The ideology of the life’s spittoon, and cast underfoot
The prettiest things are without reason
Or fanfare, but come out in the down hours
To be fed by my hand, and the secret smiles I give;
How so,

Like the effluvious sides of new sports vehicles,
Like the auctioning cries from the dinner table and bright
New linguistics and the politically correct sideshows,
So well-groomed and porous and even now living
In the corner acre lots with their lawyers and lonely cypress,
But I say:

I am now reading a book I wrote,
And never again will I look into your eyes, even how
The Mexicans despise me for employing them,
For making $207,000 dollars this holiday off of her independence,
And then driving across the land we stole from them,
And picking up the cut pieces of language which should be
Given for free to the drunken Navajos.

Somewhere,
The devil is laughing and turning water from the frozen lake
Like the work of a heavy windmill, but I am ready for him,
And the way her legs have bounded away from the loci of my rest,
The way frightened deer pass through the headlights of calamity:
For, I have bought myself a home and a headstone,
And am prepared for the brevity of this job,

Thus I play baseball alone, and look at the sides
Of my face equally, and eat two hot dogs for dinner, and
Lying with my dogs at 9,000 feet say quietly now that this is
Freedom: The liquor in the glass and in my veins,
The loneliness opening away like strange flowers in a high basin,
Making me say now that this is all,
This is all, and I am a simple yankee
No longer afraid to fire the laughing vatos,
For I am even now laughing as if I were a coyote,

For even now I am smiling, for
Her eyes are green and just beginning to see.