Robert Rorabeck - Hoeing My Father's Row

Any day now the planes will fall,
The plum will fall from the plum tree’s
Lip,
And the little blue girl will look upon it
And drool- She will not think that
These are the tools she’s seen,
Or that the deeper narcissisms would have
Begun constructing gravities and fairy-tales-
All the neurosis of having fine young
Entrepreneurs as forbearers- Angelic
Youths whose blond hair wilted to silver,
Who no longer straddle the earth dirtying their
Short pink buckskins,
But instead go inside when it rains and talk on
The phone. She will tell the ants to take the plum,
Even as the sky quickens and begins to fester
Like putrid cottage cheese.
I watched her stare at it for hours atop
Hadrian’s Wall- I wasn’t supposed to be there.
I was supposed to be hoeing my father’s row,
But the composition of the still-life she formed
Intrigued me so that it was too late to learn my lesson,
And the enemy’s keen arrow knocked me in the side
From out of nowhere.
Pirouetting like a gallant destruction
I became still and broken beneath her gaze,
Like a whispering fruit where I could see the ants
Marching with multisegmented expectations,
Heave-hoing from her saturnine conduction. I didn’t
Know what I was doing, and neither did she.
The arrow had broken off and dug deeper like a serpent
For more knowledge.
She watched me until the rains started
Showing her bee-stung cleavage.
I thought maybe she almost decided a wicked smile
Before she turned like a heavenly shadow at morning
And drove home still drooling to eat;
I pretended that after I died she would come and look at
Me again, but I knew she would tell none of her family,
The enemies.
I took comfort and waited for the ultimate return.

Robert Rorabeck

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