Robert Rorabeck Poems

Trucks burn through the forest
Where wolves sleep:
The sky is blue; the carport is green and there
Are virgins in both of those places:
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How innocence wanders the innocuous highway,
How, bearded, he dreams of the thigh he’s
Never touched,
As he sleeps in the weeds like a disposed general
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Her water colored bicycle has many dreams
Of pin-ball, and ping pong, and pool;
I used to sit across class from her and pretend
That I could know her in a swimming-pool
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When it is easy, I wake up and there is a
Fog on the hills, and the stones lay sweating in
The grass,
And north there are great holes above the earth,
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This room is all carefully worked marble,
And this is how it goes:
Generations of sallow faced progenitors line the
Halls, stare forwards at one another in no
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As I interviewed in a
Place of trees,
Castles crept up to Heaven’s
Knees;
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Another long thing
To make the ladies squeal, I suppose,
Dark and sleepy trolled up
From the Welsh bog:
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These shells are empty of their children,
And their songs,
So now only the sea comes like lamenting
Mothers. Cupped to the ear,
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You deserve better words than mine,
Angled in soft lies, like prehistoric trout found
In the oily conservation of their brief lives:
I flow upstream for you with all I can,
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Without my parents here I have to improvise,
But I don’t skip lines:
I bake sugar cookies for my dogs,
And talk to my grandfather’s ghost wearing a fur
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