Robert Rorabeck Poems

Indications of a lost game, and of Indian slaughter:
The moonbeams seem to rush over the chassis of the simulacrum,
As their hoods take on the aspects of a French wilderness:
And the trappers beckon hoping to snag the pony tails of
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At first the cathedrals stuck up in the
High water marks of the trees
Where we used to skip school and tried at looking in
The most absurd of ways which we
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Like a draft of words, calling up the armies
Into the arms of loneliness, knowing this all at the start,
And folding paper snowflakes into my wounds,
Trying to forget about the ways that the dying cowboys
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I don’t want to have to fight you for
The nice color of your eyes: the ants will have it anyways,
And take it to their queen as a nice surprise
Underneath the roller rinks of the downed stewardesses
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Here, I want to fall in love,
Right in the passions of the singing garden,
Rich with insects and serpents,
The very few reasons meandering through the
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There are things that I shouldn’t say,
That you shouldn’t hear,
But I want to anyways, while the Ferris Wheels are
Caesuraing perpetually into the sky,
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As if the very wildflowers were your family:
Alma, but I am still right
Here, like a rattlesnake with a sweet tooth for your
Woebegone ankles,
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As if the very wildflowers were your family:
Alma, but I am still right
Here, like a rattlesnake with a sweet tooth for your
Woebegone ankles,
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Writing in the earliest joy,
Caracoling the old neighborhoods that never raised
Anything new,
And even made the sun seem wearied, going up and whistling
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Up into the opposites dawning their smatterings
Of mailboxes:
The lawns seemingly pressed underneath the
Christmas trees,
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