The Mermaids I Love Are Praying Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Day is up like a yellow cadaver in a stone country:
Which is nothing morbid, if you know who he is,
A laughing relative still too happy for death, experimented on
By magpies and down here in the tropics, herons:
Long necked, serpentine, fishers with spears for beaks:
Well, I jog in the daylight of my morbid relatives:
I even exhumed myself quite speedily alongside the greatest
Rush of traffic,
And I see all the nature that this semi-urban day has to spell:
Herons and terrapins and raccoons going down to the hot
Canal; and the fish underneath the highway’s windowsill,
And I have even prayed to girls who are not real;
And I have made a mess of myself altogether like a frightened
Tourist at his hotel,
And I have watched the processions of conquistadors
Melt like hot wax into a quintile;
But the day of my jaundice ancestor has always kept near me
And run like the yellowest of ribbons against my sun pricked skin,
And I have waited near the shady coolness all of this habitat
For him to stop dancing, and to go down once again
Under the bluest slab, and under the grottos where even now
The mermaids I love are praying.