The River It Ruined Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Be a word, or bright thing,
Light-bulb, pillow-fight of pumice
Light:
Imitating a young Frank O’Hara,
I ask the little girls what they are reading.
They don’t care,
They’ve read two hundred novels this
Summer:
They’re on a quest- They’ve figured out
Green iron keeps away elves,
But they have to use it three times,
Three times,
Three times: And all the horses in the valley.
Are horses color-blind; and the rest of the valley
Had its mug-shot taken,
Was tired of the pantheisms of the western hemisphere
Always kicking out the day;
It went quite peacefully: it was priest going to
Proselytize the other end of the earth- Go tell your
Mothers what she’s worth;
And I picked these daisies for you, but the educated man
Called them weeds; and I was pretty sure it was weeds (then) ,
Ashamed to have picked it for you
Standing indisposed watching the cars grow
In their rows,
Like old friends out of birthday cakes
Or dragon fangs was how it ended like the fair book said it,
Like a picture outside a dun fort of beautiful dead
until the river it ruined.