Robert Rorabeck Poems

Pretty as a child in the
Throes of truancy—tumbling down hill
With lilacs in her hair and the dogs following her:
Just a succession of paper wings
...

How do you look here—colluding in your telekinesis
While your grandmother is sleeping—
Dreaming in a bed which pretends to be spread across
All of Africa:
...

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-
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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
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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
...