The Way We Believe Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This doesn’t have to be the way we believe in
For us to die:
I will never at all know what it means to be newly escaped
From Mexico,
Where the snow falls and is pricked right away by
Windmills,
And then comes down like camel tears, like cigarettes in the
Taught billfolds of coquets,
While the alligators wait by themselves, until all of that summer
Is finally packed up;
And the guts of the tourists are sucked in,
And the treats are laid off for long contemplations of the
Cenotaphs fanning themselves in the most
Feral amusements of the waves,
As right this way all of this had to happen, shameful,
Even as the next of the hurricanes was turning around,
And husbands and wives tried to survive together lost from
The perfumes of
The vanishing orchards, their copper cannons once green,
Now emptily venomous and looking out across the definably
Slender lakes of those canals,
And having their way with themselves, and everything else
That I am sure of rotted away,
Like right off the rinds of her green kilns that were even still
Trying to remember the luxury of the rhymes of her favorite color,
Even though they didn’t have anything else by which to live;
And the conquistadors came, lustrously courting the stewardesses
Who dusted across the sky like luxurious sieves.