Robert Rorabeck Poems

Get on your high horse
And beat a dead dog-

I’ve always known who I am,
...

Leap over to me and ask me my name,
And I will point into the sunlit sky like a barbershop
And humph:
Because that is all you should know about me,
...

Here is a canvas I must destroy, for soon the lightning
Will be on the peak, and we will need to scramble down
Into our graveyard before we are struck by a juvenile deity
Who is angry we have been playing outside our gray rooms;
...

I procrastinate on my poetry:
I have nothing lovely to add:
You turn me on, you turn me on, you
Know, but it doesn’t get me anything,
...

You wronged me in a song
Of cypress and spikenard,

In the somnambulating fog of humming students
...

The sun is a fine instrument, scalding the earth,
Making it leap and gesticulate, spitting the winds
From its orifices like young boys spitting across the abyss-
And the sun has seen us all awaking in our clays,
...

There is no iceberg under my lines: Their enjambment
Is a rush hour of pining men, lines of silver cadavers voyaging
Into the great red forests pressing the Pacific:
Totem poles tilting in the Oregon mud, with drunk Indians
...

The prom queens are in disguise,
Brushing in their raiment, slipping like anorexic
Manatees into the green goodbye,
And the world is overheating, panting like a tortoise
...

Getting up is getting easier now that I know
Who I am:
A poet of some possibility, as the sun shies through
The leafy arcade,
...

Each following word is like the freewill of a trance:
I can give roses, roses, roses,
And sun, and sea, and sun, and sea,
For I have spent most evenings laying on your floor
...