Robert Rorabeck Poems

Florida is returning to the way she looked
Just before the sixteenth century,
The conquistadors swimming in their bloody
Bouquets and hang-over hard-ons:
...

The hedges crawl up further around the stewardesses,
Like unruly rinds around their ankles,
While my parents were kicked out of your fruiteria today,
Alma- and tomorrow I might be without a job:
...

This Sunday morning I am trying to write poetry sober:
I am inside my yellow house, but it is a long ways until
October:
I have the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the foyer of my house;
...

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,
...

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;
...

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
...

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:
...

Up and down the subdivisions, this body feels warm:
And these eyes have seen helicopters,
And felt their midsummer swarm- they go underneath the erudite
Moon like a tropical depression of primary colors:
...

My eyes happen to turn off in the middle of
A zoetrope of summer vacation:
And it isn’t any fun anymore, covering myself with
The canopies of defeated bi-planes:
...

This is very exciting- this is another night swallowed
Without wondering where all of the conquistadors
Have gone,
But back to their shallow estuaries and nurseries where
...