Happily Illiterate Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Inconceivable, that she could
Have thought of me today, the one I
Love best and injure myself still deeper
Until I am thoroughly carved,
Petra glyph west of the Mississippi,
The river an incision, the spine in the book,
And we two pages, where I am a
Half-hazard illustration of her prose,
Shunting the swelled cerebellum with a plume
And ink, dabbing the labyrinthine bloom:
I have no other reason to crawl around these
Lines, elicit the agony that I still
Do not know how to spell; but a subtle
Scar from high school, ghostly she echoes
Through the turn-about where parents came,
And deposited us again into our separate estuaries,
Whose cajoling currents in time caused the
Subtle amnesias which took us to other moons,
While I continued to swear by her earliest light
Mottled through the evergreen: Laughing,
She partakes of the fermentations of the salted bar,
Tossing back the citrus of anonymous piracies,
She looms, full mast and out the door,
Bosom the orbs which light the streets,
Her lips and limbs are luscious words,
I read to her, though she remains happily illiterate.