Robert Rorabeck Poems

Strange as the shadows of the armpits of
The sun—
My father trades upon his hopes and fears,
And real live angels hold their breath long enough
...

Sun set itself through the aluminum sea—
Paper and toy angels dancing
Through a midsummer's shopping mall
While my wife slept—
...

There was nothing under the airplane,
But the sun:
The sun was female and seemed to be
In a wave of sky-
...

Pretty as a nebula of an eye blinded by
A cane pole,
As mine almost was—while all of the skeletons
Got up to dance,
...

Write in a cradle of luxury:
And wait for the traffic to pass by like
Beautiful lures
And housewives in their mouths:
...

Orchards are made of men who
Cannot sleep—as fairies sleep in the cabbages and
Pumpkins:
And they drink teardrops of farmers who
...

Today we are looking in at the sons of Walt Whitman
And the torpedoes floating softly beyond the stained glass windows
Just on the other side of the hypocrisies of the church
That has sunken with the tears from the girl you abandoned:
...

And I will sing into the heirloom of a lip
That doesn't matter—taking off into a bedroom
Of the beautiful Barbie dolls that don't
Have to swear for shooting themselves:
...

Pranksters of my boyhood still lighting off
Fireworks across the roofs of another school day—
Like all of Mexico laughing
As they propagated and made new streams into our
...

Acrobats of Spanish glasses,
Of peat most that feed the sod and grasses:
I broke my jaw,
I broke my glasses; and the winters came and
...