The Roses Of Stolen Ribs Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The Roses Of Stolen Ribs



Fleet as the cannons go, coughing their verbs
Through the melting snow:
As it happens right here, along the long drooling jaws
Of the hermaphrodites
Doing wanders to their pillows, like starving conquistadors
That confront the satellites across the insurgencies
Of archipelagoes,
And then go away mumbling to eat their horses:

And to fanfare and woebegone symmetry: to any of this
And all of this at once:
To what was never any grandmother’s vanity anyways:
To cloy armpits and to smitten, love smitten, cash;
And then to falling away like embers and popinjays,

Across the heath rows and cornstalks on the other side
Of canals where my busy hands, my busy suburban hands have
Spend so many fireworks,
Manhandling, pinwheels, to all sorts of aristocracies:

Until the last light flames, and it is time to turn in: and her brown
Is dun anyways, and comes no more, but like wax spent off of a candle
Into a house of butterflies rests without repose,
While all that was inside of her, her breathe, her alma, vanishes into
The elements, perfumes airplanes with the roses of stolen ribs.

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Robert Rorabeck

Robert Rorabeck

Berrien Springs
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