Salvos Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This night salvos into nothing;
Narvaez and de Vaca are full of virgin arrows;
The festive quills bloom like pompadours from their cracked elbows.
The waves break like a nurse’s knuckles
Over the frightened conquistadors in the eerie bay of caballos;
Like broken ants, they are somehow still alive;
Though their bearded faces scribble in darkening circles,
The amputated buddings of man and his animals excite the opulent gulls,
While the flint and ire fly from the disrupted panhandle-
Halfway to Texas, on an atoll of her curse,
They will eat the rest of themselves,
Before succumbing to the naked slavery of the blue sky,
And the un-flexing knees will beat the dead man’s march
On their skin which now tightly adorns the golden sun.

Ghosts enter Mexico City during an eclipse,
The waves whispering their secretive comidas;
The young lovers search their lips for sandy participles;
Her brow furrows primera with the call of his nombre;
This night salvos into nothing,

Her knights have returned home.