Their Semiprecious Boudoirs Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Every word that I have done, unexpected and unwise-
Listing there like a legless pet begging for her eyes:
Rhyming like winos bending their lips to a bottle exeunt of
Geniis or stewardesses:
Their hoary Adams apples cursing the skies:
Bending backwards on the scoliosis of tattered weather veins
And fossils of coelacanths of backwoods roads:
Down where your mother tipped over pregnant with your
Little sister, drowning with her last breath in a blue
Carp upturned like an electronic terrapin whistling underneath
The mud and the brambles
Like a bump on a log, like an entire hallucination- a wish
For a birthday of a child who has never existed on a day that is
Not counted, underneath a sky that doesn’t go so far, but makes
Its contributions as the girls return in before their echoes
Who are always halfway dressing or undressing in the half light
Of their semiprecious boudoirs.