With Its Heartbroken Love Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My mother does the wash behind my back
While I feel up my bad cheek:
The Guatemalans are now well home to sleep,
And I read some Borges in translation.
Then I read a poem I’ve written before to Erin.
And it is not good:
The way I masturbate into the ever ready night
With the background noises of the way
Things have always began,
The way they are always going.
The things you can’t get back, things covered
Up by weather,
And all the sad mermaids matriculated in from the
Everglades,
Or places I can no longer believe in,
While she works in the despondency of a true misfit,
And I have accidentally erased the more
Beautiful things I had to say to her,
When I promised not to say anything at all to her
Once more or ever again:
The mythology of a good woman walking alone in the
Park,
Baring children like fruit,
Her eyes so lonely, but her body so well perceived;
And prop airplanes flying low in the dark,
Sound like the dangerous kisses of
Venal lovers while
I don’t remember how I began to speak of this fugue,
How I hoped that it might resonate for years after
Instead of coming out as a stillborn prepackaged into
A coffin,
Something that will break my parents hearts until
Their very own graves,
And yet no one else on earth will be familiar with its
Heartbroken love
At all.