Robert Rorabeck Poems

If I try again, as if taking myself to the graveyard,
Skipping the schools of light, to read here with the witches
Who never looked more beautiful,
The clouds gurgling a spell in the sky, and all of the little boys
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Without looking up the gold of sheriffs,
This is the way that sometimes the goldfish have to survive
On Tuesdays,
Open mouthed, while the housewives’ Mexican cleaning ladies
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Jasmine in a summer creak, pin wheeling,
Perfume as blanketed as if some snow lingered there
Invisible in the vermilion dew;
And tiny brown footsteps wimpling the grass over strewn
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Arrowheads are not as far underneath the earth
As dinosaurs, but I am having a harder time believing on
My knees than I did before—
The virgins are still in my house—like the fables of
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Sun to my diamond while I live at home—
Specks of emptiness in her eyes where she once
Required me—
As I go sleep-walking like a torn kite outside
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Nubile poem on the cleft of an orb—
Silence slips over the curves of a river-
And the strange jewelry that decorates the housewives
Without a sound—
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Corrupted into the grandeurs of the theatres of incents—
Of grandeurs of grandeurs
Of sounds that cannot rest—the hummingbird of a mockingbird
Seems to consist of the ringlets of the starlight
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Washing away the salt from your lips,
Bending over the drinking fountain in the hallway
In the middle of the day,
Lost in a daydream—you don't wish to be taken
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Our time at the zoo—if you cannot remember—heavenly light before
The second time we made love—
The ostrich took a special interest in you—
We watched the kaki attendants pretending to know falconry—
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Kings falling down a hill into a playground,
Beside the traffics,
Or in California made up with
The make believe unicorns—
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