Robert Rorabeck Poems

While you were waiting for
A sound from the tomb,
Of a vampire or werewolf,
I was right there
...

The highest swing-sets taken down
Over the ghosts of
Where I once parked my truck—
That adolescence of
...

In a whispering melancholia the night tells
Its horses
There are no more sanctimonious orchards
To steal—
...

Merry-go-rounds of new and other words
That seemed to be going around just like this
Underneath the olive groves
In the curling sepulchers of Spain,
...

Warm is the merry-go-round in
The yoke of daylight, cheering itself,
An omelet of the midway
Where Spanish girls who are so fare
...

Silver slippered grasshoppers in a cloud
Of ambulances—
My pregnant wife in the bathroom attending
To her grievances—
...

In this graveyard, in this cathedral—the girls look up—
And now they seem delighted—
And now they are turning away, turning up the rocks
Towards the faces of god knows what—
...

Now there is this joy in the night that
I don't know—the movie theatre is virtually abandoned—
And you are abandoned:
There is only your echo—
...

They made a massacre underneath the sun—maybe they
Were just playing with themselves—
While, in the tomorrow, the sun would jump up yelping and
Asking for help
...

The soon seems to be playing with the night and the stewardesses
Wherever they are cannot get any sleep—
There they are impossibly up in the angles of the clouds
And I do not know what else to say to them—
...