Robert Rorabeck Poems

What is there to say of your love- you have
Gone to Palmetto to be with your husband, to see your
Son-
And from my life, like mist rising from the campuses
...

Dogs lay brilliant beside their home:
The entire mountain has burned, and Alma has run
Away to Ocala:
When I made love to her, it was just after her husband
...

They are selling something to the black men,
As to the doors the step, and in their colors dimmed-
The swing-sets emptied behind them,
And the airplanes flying stiffed winged through the
...

Roe in the lost chalices- in the cul-de-sacs
Of suburbia where Halloween has come and gone,
And the truants fart like knights lost from
Their errands-
...

Upon the bones of heavy slumbering
They cheated on their loved ones inside a bus
That was broken down in the
School yard
...

Children turning to ghosts as they ride their
Trains outside of Mexico- the tricky tracks of the
Foundlings- they go into the emptiness of
The desert
...

Tonight my muse lies in sleep with him
Like a mermaid who has come ashore smelling the rose
That will become her grave:
There is her bed between the dunes, and her eyes
...

Parade of purple airplanes with nothing better to
Do,
Going up in the sky and kissing clouds who haven’t
Decided just yet what projection they are:
...

There she is like a seahorse attending bar-
Underneath the halogens of the football stadium like a
Lighthouse:
She trawls through the night laughing with her brown
...

These words fail to slice open beauty—
They deliver only the annoyance of a paper-cut
To her half-open eyes
When they want to gash her open with a mortal
...