True Beauty Poem by Robert Rorabeck

True beauty eludes me after I saw her
Out in the student park lot taking his cigarette
To lips, contemplative and sharing,
But just tasting the rolled tobacco
Eyes having never seen Bell Glade,
Not inhaling
All the brown sugar cane workers migration
In egg-shell blue busses past the last zoo to the
West,
Never seen how they congregate and baptize
Down the cocklebur easement of that coagulated
Alligator tank with creepy lilies turning,
Eat ham and sour eggs on red clay,
Imparting bare-chested and naked-lipped
Drippy watermelon
Voodoo and fumy rum witchcraft approaching midnight;
Divvy up the moon as they meander to the dusky track,
Tarnished and yet forensic.
Could not see her before she took off with
The quarterback in a full dollar swoon
Blindly guided to his home turf in the gloomy afternoon
Of our suburbia, took off like the last wave cresting:
Her virginal notch now like a cinder stoked in a horn.
I suppose I should have followed her,
Began that tramp, thrown my books of algebra and
Easy logic to the dogs and skunks,
Cavorted to a private war through the splicing
Shade of tight green palmettos like knives in a drawer,
Could have crawled up to the steamy window to
The pitter-patter of mostly affluent rain,
Been a onomatopoeia voyeur
Could have laid there smelling chlorine as the pool was
Rippling, as the earth was swelling;
Rains fell cleaning
And maybe I howled believing the moon was full and rehearsing
Behind the cultish clouds like apoplectic satin:
Back in Plato’s cave, having microwaved,
Alone in front of the television, masturbated on a green
Carpet of my derision, rhyming like a snail poking
Its head out of the curling salmon shell,
And then shrinking back in again:
Poor old man-
I cut paper and made airplanes and sold them over my
Head to the ceiling gods, the little dusty gods who can’t
Even spell- Pretended she was on them serving
Drinks to horizontal windmills
While over my shoulder to the west with the day labor witches,
The sugarcane goes burning, fuming in an intoxicating swell.
Then in so foreign a place that it comes from the
Opposition direction, like in a sad movie
They are interlocking bodies and fists, knuckles popping,
Silhouettes enthralled
While greedily over the canal, ululating, the sugarcane,
Roaring burns as brightly as a thundershower,
obscuring what I know must be real:
How she loves in turns,
Things she’s been told to love, and those which
Are now just occurring,
Like grey lips on the television I cannot hear
But yet are moving.