Robert Rorabeck Poems

Imaginations of all of those castles—
Over-spilling while the wash is just becoming done,
Over the beds that we cannot realize,
Over the imaginations of the setting sun:
...

Where all of the minnows go to drink
Around the knees of key deer
Until their tiny wishes sink
Under them:
...

I told her,
“I’m the man who shot Jesse James.”
She said,
“Poetry don’t work on whores.”
...

Sounds of your memory—what does
It mean, all of those diseases:
Thinking and thinking of Colorado
Where my mother was born outside of Denver—
...

I groped her body like a blind gardener;
And she was yet too taught to have any children or
To have drunken much liquor,
So I imagine that tomorrow she will be shopping,
...

Words on a veranda of awakening species:
There you can see them coming up from the mud,
Crackling,
Like lightning and jub-jub:
...

I heard the noise of casual horses underneath
The pines,
And then the moon was unsecured and drifting-
I was frightened because my dictionary was
...

Today, the same old things- the new scars,
Ringless fingers,
And the way the clouds tended to move like
Somnulent cars
...

The night is a stogy panther- With you in it
Further north and away,
And in it always remaining those things I cannot
Spell and thus cannot say-
...

Rains, you patter on
The tents- soft mouse-foot
Patter,
I think of Tennessee aunts
...