Robert Rorabeck Poems

In the absence of lies lays beauty:
She is looking up at Midwestern sky,
Just a palette, unhemmed by the artist’s verbiage:
No power lines distending from house,
...

If you are standing with the beautiful people,
Aping beneath the lavender sun:
How will you hear me
Read you the thirtieth canto:
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Are you still spilling Cimarron
After the peddlers have gushed
Amidst the stones
And tufts of grass:
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Because I can never be
As beautiful as my mother,
And because I can never be
As truthful as my father was,
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A great well crafted sting,
Folded in the pages of a butterfly:
Where the sea rises and breathes
In the afternoon of epiphanies,
...

Inside Shakespeares:
One, two, three:
My dogs are barking sonnets
As they mark their territory:
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Those feelings who let you in are going now,
Lighting out in that terrible fog:
The last one I can feel is the one letting me know,
Holding the door open as we wave the others goodbye:
...

A few glasses
And a few more words for you,
A simpler time:
A common beauty.
...

Young life is born in the morning,
And with it the pain which brings it across:
There it is out in the field
Gamboling on four unsteady legs
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Infrequently the heart mingles:
Pulsates like a basin giving off code:
Here her eyes mix with something
Obscured:
...