Robert Rorabeck Poems

Laying in the hedgerows, nose red with rum,
The rattlesnakes despising the cotton mouths up from the
Banks of the really torpid drainage:
The sky all blue with shark’s teeth and shark’s wounds;
...

There are reasons that I keep writing it down,
But I am not sure that I remember;
Maybe it is because the lines have made a tragedy of my
Features;
...

This day will be a fieldtrip,
Skipping with arms enfolded in a small click of friends:
We will have songs to sing, or we will evaporate:
For the rivers come here thirstily: they get salty from grief:
...

I glance through the Venetian blinds,
Looking at the vegetation furtively the way a young
Child looks at a beautiful woman who is not
His mother;
...

What moves without more reflection than this,
And I am standing in a terminal watching the hallucinations
Fleet:
They go like soft sailors tickling the skyways, and beautiful
...

Diana is the goddess of the hunt and in her
Lunch truck, talking all the time on the phone, she has
Amble beauty:
She magnetizes the earth, and she has tried on the baby blue
...

Rum moves through this body; it puts the scars to sleep
Like anchovies softly breathing over the flesh:
It gives girls I know lighthouses to feel with valuable clothes,
And it brings other girls to them like sailors all shampooed
...

I have a hard time moving through the day,
Sharon;
So I sing to you between my teeth, between my eyes:
This evening or the next, as always, you will be my sick muse,
...

Doggone traveler, take comfort in your unrefundable works,
These wasted allegories of the mountains and streams which
Breath and mold from her breath and down from her neck,
...

I have found an affordable ghost town

(not in her eyes, as you might think)
...