Picking Time Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pools of accordions, and other young wind instruments:
If I’d died young, I’d never have written this underneath the softly
Pleasing penumbras of the wingspans of airplanes
Even as they slipped away,
Like the sluicing rabbits through the vines, and like their
Very four legged souls through my very four legged mine:
I have seen her there in the morning like a cenotaph for a wave
Who was breaking against the rose bushes of the fort for the
First and the last time:
And this was her journey, and her beauty, while she finally laid
Down in bed with him, for the first and the last time:
And her name was Alma, a muse, a candle lit for a saint in
A lactating grotto deep inside the inebriated amusement parking
Of my picking time.