Robert Rorabeck Poems

They just go on and one,
Don’t they- and they can start up in
Anyway,
Like pulling the choke string on a kite
...

Red in the handlebars of the sun,
Something always gold-
And I can hardly hold on:
I don’t like to look where she is milking,
...

I give more words, like an overdose:
We use shovels to raise the dead, cheap
Eucharist. Mother is looking at me again,
With those eyes like robin’s eggs,
...

Caffeine has me up, while they make love
In another sea, spilling vocabulary words
I haven’t memorized: the piano plays behind
The unmowed grass, like minutes of sunlight
...

The final common man crossed me with his sword,
Said there will be a night beside the sea when the lord
Will rise,
Arms outstretching, a denouement epiphany,
...

The ocean is so close to me,
As if this overpass were a cradle:
The earliest stars are like her eyes to me,
And her lips an offering ladle;
...

I shouldn’t have made love to you,
For I shrunk,
In hiccupping seasons where the world turns
Away; and I was cuckolded for good
...

I wait for customers in this bay,
Or I read Anne Sexton and hope for quaint
Stigmata, like overly dramatic Catholic plays:
Or the overly education girls from the peripheries
...

Here are the seating arrangements lactating
In mausoleums
With ceilings full of blown glass in the shape of
Shells—
...

Consumed upon the terraces of the
Ferris Wheels
That are turning from the evaporations under
Their streets:
...