Robert Rorabeck Poems

How innocence wanders the innocuous highway,
How, bearded, he dreams of the thigh he’s
Never touched,
As he sleeps in the weeds like a disposed general
...

When it is easy, I wake up and there is a
Fog on the hills, and the stones lay sweating in
The grass,
And north there are great holes above the earth,
...

These shells are empty of their children,
And their songs,
So now only the sea comes like lamenting
Mothers. Cupped to the ear,
...

This room is all carefully worked marble,
And this is how it goes:
Generations of sallow faced progenitors line the
Halls, stare forwards at one another in no
...

You deserve better words than mine,
Angled in soft lies, like prehistoric trout found
In the oily conservation of their brief lives:
I flow upstream for you with all I can,
...

Knighted amongst the periwinkles of conquistadors
While Sharon was getting nose bleeds up in her mountains,
We all pretended to be any sort of privateers
Up in the nosebleeds of our truancy;
...

Here in the twilit distance of nothing that was ever
Perfect,
I hold your head against the ancient walls that cry with your
Spanish decrees:
...

This is how they helped the scores of the word,
This is how the swordfish and the seahorses tangled in
A ballroom of kelp and sunken heirlooms;
Or this is how it never happened, how it all drunk alone
...

Let me take you to the places on the side,
The green pastures and ivied slopes that drip
With anticipation, waiting for us to couple in
The writhing jade undergrowth,
...

The trees are tremendous above the busses:
Even the bullies shrink, and their houses:
You know, these things are always created in the hues of
Your favorite colors,
...