Robert Rorabeck Baseball Poems

The weather is brave but a slave to baseball,
And I like that kind of weather for this
Time of year,
Because all the aspens are naked, opalescent
...

On a wash day, the traffic streams a river.
The bears are watching from the brambles, they've
Tumbled into the briar pit for fun.
They are learning to start fires,
...

Not deserving the soldiers of my heavens
Here they come again-
Night and panthers and night bivouacked underneath
The stars where I
...

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:
...

White stars underneath the palmettos—
It means another angel is falling in love—or my old
Muse's rabbits (that we thought had disappeared)
Are making love,
...

Shadows of an ambulance in the shoulders of a
Christmas tree:
The elves seem to be telling us everything about love:
But it may just be an impersonal emergency:
...

Another living grave bleeds the flowers of night:
This is all my middle-class mind knows how—darkly obsessed—
Making love through the unadulterated anarchy of
These cul-de-sacs—one or two other feral boys lighting off
...

Manner less bandits japing at my tents,
Paging through their thesauruses—
While I am left mumbling, numberless fingers
In my mouth wanting to ride the
...

Songs in lines flung by hands that cannot fish—
And, maybe, do not love, of course—
Except for the little fairies on the cliffs,
That come in jubilee across the reddened saddles
...

Belly fattened by graveyards of baseball—
Another startling blue jay out on the battlefields underneath
The Christmas trees and all of their weeping monuments—
Why does it have to come to this—
...

Vespers in the early morning while the bartenders yawn,
And the crawdads flash underneath the oaken
Driftwood- maybe you’ve thrown your favorite vanity outside
The window at this time of early morning,
...

Repeating in the lions of the gaseous promises:
They sometime get lit up, and have their song- like girls
With lips in sleds,
They go over their boreal beds, and know when they
...

Here is the prism, floating up like a mad
Scientist on Nitric Oxide:
This is the turtle dove sticking its neck into the
Sea,
...

These pillages of words from a mind imperfect
From kindergarten, you would think would finally grow tired
From the immaculate hedgerows of the occultish windmills;
But everyday waking up inside the thin walls of
...

It hurts to look myself in the eye
Of gray eyed mirrors;
Hurts to come again on valentines while
You’ve been playing baseball.
...

I hear the rumor of dancing green mermaids:
For moments they seem to be,
Leaping breathlessly and coughing from the
Traffic’s bolero;
...