Robert Rorabeck Poems

The light happened on the kid in his time:
The class stood up and listened to their named and
Then brushed their heart to the flag,
And I eventually and for evermore fell away, and started
...

Night of twenty-four hours in twelve months of
Holidays,
Crooning in séances, sharpened on the wet stone of
Spikenard’s epiphany;
...

Now that my mind is free and I have friends,
And my broken nose is healing beautifully,
I can go out in the yard and count the snow, discerning
Why my sister placed the wedding guests as she did,
...

Why haven’t you written the most beautiful eulogies,
If your senses are so impaired: why only essays and religious
Treatises
Making the same wages of your pronged love as an airplane
...

Bodies become impaired at sunset, Sharon,
Or they fall in love, as you spend all day long in
A cradle of yellow abyss:
Rams drink the ribbons that curl down through the crust
...

Aspens are always in sorority:
They are almost as light as air, they strike out tenderly:
They are tenebrous and winsome,
And they come after the fire easily when there are no more
...

Pitiless contributories aglow in the hearths of
Collegiate mountains:
I have been drinking rum, Sharon, but tonight you might
As well be my muse: Do you yet read these awful dalliances,
...

Pitiless night, undress me to no one,
And publish me in the pit of an entombed unicorn,
Throbbing with the still life deep beneath the sea:
Take me to museums of mausoleums
...

So my face has its own zeniths that the puppet strings
Of gravity keeps pulling down:
I look sadder and sadder, and I am the jubilant paradox
Waiting outside of college classrooms
...

Okay, I think that woman loves me
From the patience of her open transom,
Or she has been staring for so long:
Doesn’t she know that I could spell for the love
...