The Culprits Of The Easier Earth Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Suffering for years in the basins of skree
And glacier tears:
This is where the dumb dreams yawn, sour gummed through
The whisping hollies,
Too high up for cowboys ever to have been scalped here:
Here you can just hear the echoing of the
Steam engines
Carrying the corpulent tourists and their irrational abounds
Between Silverton and Durango:
This is where you can never see me, striking above the
Earth,
Go so high up as to meet the boot heels of insufficient gods,
And the cradles of their possibilities,
Their casting calls wide open and full of drowning outlaws,
Their keyholes fabulous and woebegone until
They are filled with light
And then that is where the feral angels live and make
Choruses and smoke rings
Up to the sulfurous bellies of airplanes who seem to
Be leaping on a hot, cerulean plate;
And then there are banishments with the sun going down,
And all the wistful hikers returning to the make believe of all
Their tents to be wet dreams for grizzly bears with nose bleeds:
And way up there is where the rocks and stones gossip for,
Like entire clutches of rattlesnakes
Making believe they will be birthed in a clutch of sonorous
Petrified flora,
Where even the most temporary of winds are good enough for
The hypnosis of glass blowers; and it dries my throat,
All of these metaphor-like similes,
Coming down from the trains of the hollow road, sifting down
Like the wrong way evaporations who only camp in the higher beauties;
And here they are, hardly discernable but summiting
And pointing down mightily at the culprits of the easier earth.