How Easily You Stole Our Breath Away Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The bodies burn in yellow candles like cadavers
Who are on the Spanish hillside,
But I guess we always have to start somewhere and somehow:
I broke your golden jewelry when you let me make love
To you one time and forever,
While all the cars passed like painted lions on the streets,
While all of the dying Indians crossed their hearts with poisoned
Bows and then flew away:
Up and up to the gods of your grandfathers, and from the arid forests
And jungles that I can never pretend to know:
That is the strange and beautiful mask of your opulent virtues by which
You proceed through your day with,
By which too you fawn for my father because he is your patron,
While you asked me in your car today what made my mother a good
Mother, and I responded like an unwelcome echo that
I did not know,
And you made fun of me for buying my clothing at a thrift store,
Even while you wore my gold, even while you’d been in my house that
Very same morning I had bought with the fishhooks of cash,
And the lights went out and the stars did not shine
But were remembered in the blackout of zoetropes,
While the hurricanes whispered like washing machines around and around
In the limpid miss numberings of the fools I had planted for you:
While your body moved through the sky and through the streets of
Our day,
Never imagining- Alma, how easily you stole our breath away.