How Precious You Are Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Just as I sleep, I drink alone:
You don’t need to see my I.d.,
I have my dogs with me,
I have gray hair as proof,
Still it makes me want to kiss you when
I buy my liquor, my cheap rum
Once a week to write my poesy:
I should kiss you at this line, I will,
Then I’ll return to Florida and sell produce
With my father, expectant of your greetings.
They are starting classes tomorrow at the
University I was to attend,
I wont be going:
The light is a shallow play across the shallow bay
Of my amusements;
And eventually I’ll buy a house here
After all the girls from my class are married,
And I’ll drink my rum, and say
Now I know you won’t be coming, but it is a
Beautiful thing to sit out alone and await you
While breathing my spiced rhymes across the streets
Where like the steady tortoise, the tourists
Are amusing,
Housewives and husbands, with children finely
Pressed, and I would like to emulate beside the bay where
The sailboats are sleeping like hypothetical moths,
Like the greater mythologies are sleeping in my scarred
Chest,
Hoping that you will open me up like a legume, like an
Orchard, like a clam, and eat of me as I would have of you,
And wear what pearls I have written of you
Around your neck,
Even though no one of importance yet knows how
I have maintained through my thirsty vocabularies how
Precious you are.