Robert Rorabeck Poems

Where all of the minnows go to drink
Around the knees of key deer
Until their tiny wishes sink
Under them:
...

Sounds of your memory—what does
It mean, all of those diseases:
Thinking and thinking of Colorado
Where my mother was born outside of Denver—
...

I groped her body like a blind gardener;
And she was yet too taught to have any children or
To have drunken much liquor,
So I imagine that tomorrow she will be shopping,
...

Words on a veranda of awakening species:
There you can see them coming up from the mud,
Crackling,
Like lightning and jub-jub:
...

The night is a stogy panther- With you in it
Further north and away,
And in it always remaining those things I cannot
Spell and thus cannot say-
...

Today, the same old things- the new scars,
Ringless fingers,
And the way the clouds tended to move like
Somnulent cars
...

I heard the noise of casual horses underneath
The pines,
And then the moon was unsecured and drifting-
I was frightened because my dictionary was
...

Rains, you patter on
The tents- soft mouse-foot
Patter,
I think of Tennessee aunts
...

In the fluctuating highlights of a vagrant park,
Falling in with ghosts- I am so ashamed-
I have runaway and I have nothing else to do.
The sky is upside down, according to the way its
...

Gambling for this new night
Down in the hollows,
Drinking my watered down spirits,
Hoping to see real life- moonlit humanity
...