Robert Rorabeck Poems

Then there was Colorado
The tourists traveled to, never once thinking of
Aspen,
And the steep paths up which my mother was born
...

It isn’t hard here living with my dog:
Like a turtle, I can never look up, but I get to go home
Whenever I want-
And my head stays dry: I can hold out through a fire
...

Revealed like the strange regresses of a crowd
After the baseball game is over:
The heavens fluctuating over the life in the sea:
Schoolyards in Colorado
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Virgins cut from the paper of paper airplanes:
Sleeping there like motherless goddesses across the
Impolite street- holding the rude and vulgar
Prisms of light-
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Chalices hid on Easter in my backyard:
Riding bareback and never found- and now firemen
Are climbing up mountains,
And turning around with matches- in each fist
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Now you fill me up with
Airplanes
And goldfish:
The cats sits for awhile: the sun milks up
...

They make fun for a little while
And then they play is over: the go back to work,
The rattlesnakes circulate:
The airplanes are coming down, and then it rains;
...

Down by the hop-along Cadillacs of my
Sad memories,
Bivouacked in the junkyard of the lonely
Months-
...

Wrecked in the fjords of green presents-
Diademed by the dead skin of dragon flies and their
Long forked tails-
The homeless knights, beards unshaven- are always
...

Traveling that way was troubling handiwork,
Like a kite whose tailfins are on fire, who tries
To make love to the sky
Even after all the pilots are down and inebriating
...