Robert Rorabeck Poems

This is how they helped the scores of the word,
This is how the swordfish and the seahorses tangled in
A ballroom of kelp and sunken heirlooms;
Or this is how it never happened, how it all drunk alone
...

Knighted amongst the periwinkles of conquistadors
While Sharon was getting nose bleeds up in her mountains,
We all pretended to be any sort of privateers
Up in the nosebleeds of our truancy;
...

Here in the twilit distance of nothing that was ever
Perfect,
I hold your head against the ancient walls that cry with your
Spanish decrees:
...

Florida is returning to the way she looked
Just before the sixteenth century,
The conquistadors swimming in their bloody
Bouquets and hang-over hard-ons:
...

The hedges crawl up further around the stewardesses,
Like unruly rinds around their ankles,
While my parents were kicked out of your fruiteria today,
Alma- and tomorrow I might be without a job:
...

This Sunday morning I am trying to write poetry sober:
I am inside my yellow house, but it is a long ways until
October:
I have the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the foyer of my house;
...

My eyes happen to turn off in the middle of
A zoetrope of summer vacation:
And it isn’t any fun anymore, covering myself with
The canopies of defeated bi-planes:
...

Words huffed from a quiet man’s body,
Like cloudbanks in their syllables, come easier, like
Love,
With liquor, but now I fear I should not drink unless
...

Browned onion in your sparse rib cage:
Where will you go with your child once you are all the
Way over the sacred grounds of the Indians,
And what bromeliads will bloom for you back a ways
...

It turned out that something happened along
The sky.
I was sweating, but not going home, but
Roaming
...