Robert Rorabeck Poems

New remedy of your brushworks over the soft
Cheeks of a tourist town
Where everyone lives in a cabin and keeps postcards
Of wolves:
...

They have their own rattle snakes in the shadows—
Just as every skeleton once had a tongue
Bespeaking of eyelids as curtains:
And feet with toes for a soft or horned road
...

Bar me from the other satellites sounding
That Armageddon—and we will watch the
Horses glowing green,
Feeding of the grass taught of moonlight;
...

Another soft sound meant to have
Been here,
But is this joy: the blue gills in the middle of
The day are not caught with any rum-
...

In the daylight with the school around us—
All of the exciting promises of the fair having left us:
And the fair she kept in my heart
Like a divine illusion is gone in following-
...

I have been to good airports
And seen in there many of her scars:
As she is flying away,
She is beautiful: so many words in poultices over
...

Unreal vision of a hard day’s heart:
Separated from my family, a rattle snake at birth—
Greatest delusion with only so many words
To settle the crepuscule over the mailboxes,
...

I put pieces of you on the threshold
Where the frogs wish to dance like
Princes—
And the dogs pirouette with fleas—and
...

But what beauty apart from the body:
That mythology dancing to the ground—Parades
Piggybacked on parades
Like roses in the graveyards—
...

Poison at the mouth and at the end of
A snake:
Other ways on and out of a canyon that our
Teachers made us pretend to be
...