Robert Rorabeck Poems

How to be beautiful at night all alone
Covered in a layer of sod, making love to no woman,
And minding no woman all the same:
I don’t know,
...

Bodies, starting off by themselves, get to know one another
By interspersing:
I check on them as I go through my day, like a maudlin canoe
With over sad eyes:
...

Even now the bodies burn with the deeper gentrifications
Of my new neighborhood:
Girls are looking gooder than good, as newer than new girls
Should:
...

Unicorns kindle like the virgins of green suicide:
You glide over the sight of me with the age old religious wound
In your side;
And now I will live in a house as old as a Bible, and I will
...

So you start up by pulling some machines by the rope
Around their necks.
And the lawns get mowed, while I am sure that I can fall in
Love with just about anyone as long as they are long hipped
...

Subterfuge of romance, because what other sort
Of subterfuge is there: all at once running away from war,
Running into France,
Looking at her gondola underneath all of those soft lights of
...

Deciding to start fresh every morning,
Pallbearers put any old thing into the earth; but bless
My soul if it isn’t a young thing,
Now just a pittance of dearth while the
...

Cannibals slum as rain streaks the windows
Before el arco iris,
And I have seen her turning to me like a beautiful
Ship made out of the lumber of trees
...

Words huffed from a quiet man’s body,
Like cloudbanks in their syllables, come easier, like
Love,
With liquor, but now I fear I should not drink unless
...

Airplanes make ribbons—yes, they do for
Lonely girls,
And I almost forgot that I left you here:
I do not suppose you remember me—
...