Robert Rorabeck Poems

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,
...

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,
...

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
...

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 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
...

She drinks; she:

Drinks in a velvet cushioned confessional;
Has ideas strung out under the cerulean cones in
...

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,
...

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

By sweetened virtue I start out, dashing as the cavalier
Knight:
The butterflies cut from the paper from the womb of a
Beautiful girl’s diary:
...