Robert Rorabeck Poems

The night is a cattle call: buzzards counting sheep
In the humid estuaries where grandmothers finally found
Their lost loves,
And swam, and swam with him while the train divided beneath
...

Her reams of brown skin spread out before me,
Like a picture book for everything lucky:
Because she has never know the venal sabotages of
A suburban housewife, nor
...

This doesn’t have to be the way we believe in
For us to die:
I will never at all know what it means to be newly escaped
From Mexico,
...

Alma:
The day was ours, but we did not enjoy
It,
Together:
...

Suns on fire; it’s what they do,
Like your children on the Merry Go Round,
Or in their yards after school:
And you told me you had two rabbits; but now you lie in the
...

Bountiful rainbows of blue glass going home,
Traveling with their rucksacks across the schools,
Saying their prayers otherwise:
Baseball diamonds silhouetted in the skies,
...

Suffering for years in the basins of skree
And glacier tears:
This is where the dumb dreams yawn, sour gummed through
The whisping hollies,
...

This is the way the ashes of the fireworks float
Down above the sunlit and shadowed heads of her two
Men:
One evil and one good, but both good enough for her bed,
...

This is a family alone, on a cattle drive through the
Sea,
Each one a passenger more beautiful than me,
With the great nebular cloud banks escaping from the
...

Grottos of our truancy, minute hummingbirds
In the chain smoke of battleships,
As the little yarns of school girls come unbound but
Golden
...