To Win All That They Have To Lose Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Scarred and selling in the woods, stilted by
Windmills who stretch their tattooed necks- rookeries
For the pilgrims of song birds
In the motes of light distilled through the pantomiming
Keyholes
Of disgruntled mountains: the airplanes eating themselves
Through the over clouded passes,
And everything up in the basin shedding its sins, like a
Typhoon broiled from a inland sea that dried into salt mines
Before any of us existed,
Like a burial mound looking into the drugged streets of
Mexico,
Where little girls flitter on cobble stones, and leech
The milk of moribund alley cats:
In the spume of a glittering womb of a holy mother who is
All too sure of her voluptuous attributes:
And there she hovers like the boudoir of a rain cloud,
Pinching the nipples on the fetuses of grapes,
Weathering the copperhead skin of the farmers who worship
Her as muse,
Warming their hands so by her promises of her stones,
Shaped like the eggs spilling a preferential lottery that hopes
To win all that they have to lose.