Robert Rorabeck Poems

You are a good kid even
If your eyes don't match
And I drink too much rum from Brazil
Or Cuba or the middle of the sun—
...

Now into this song the birds sing
In the middle of transit—evaporating the frogs
The ethereal swords have picked clean into the sky
Until they become another task—
...

As long as the stars and the moon don't care
We can go out swimming in the sea. As long as nobody
Can see us, we can continue swimming away—
Our backs pressed like butterfly wings beneath the
...

While on their honeymoon they eat honeydew and buy
Fireworks—they stop for a while and eat lunch
On a hill: they are filled with the premonitions of nursery rhymes:
And they are coming forward to go back again—
...

A kindergarten steps to the clouds and accepts an applause
While baseball happens beneath her—
The usual boys kicking up the skirts of red diamonds—
As the traffic sounds around the old battlements,
...

And then I had you in a purple thought—
It was just like the one they kept around the cemetery
To show off to the old widows and their bystanders:
It was a beautiful cemetery in the middle
...

Soon the moon will see us or the sun—
Kissing in the carport of a vanished honeymoon—
And the bluegills will have to sing to themselves anyways—
The tomorrows will get up as an entire band of
...

Soon the moon will see us or the sun—
Kissing in the carport of a vanished honeymoon—
And the bluegills will have to sing to themselves anyways—
The tomorrows will get up as an entire band of
...

Then we were all developed like the pornographic butterfly
Trying to make love in a bedroom in the middle of
The afternoon while in the living room all that was on
Was séances of werewolves and soap operas:
...

Oh sunlight of this place clouded into a labyrinth where
Inebriated dogs go to drown in the rose thorns grown
Across the pietas made by the armpits of dead prostitutes—
When all of the eons proceed in their shopping sprees
...