Rockabye

“We have a Chopin player in the house,” he said. And with a tiny smile he rockabyed the opening phrase of the Ballade and turned his head to look straight at Katie.

It was a pleasant day, the boat rockabyed in the slight chop and by late afternoon I was more nearly asleep than awake.

From the lowliest panhandler on the street to the worthiest recipient of today’s social security benefits we are being “spoiled rotten” and rockabyed to sleep to the strains of that haunting lullaby known as the Beggar-American Rhapsody “Gimme gimme, gimme gimme gimme.”

And lying down that night why should I hear the Brownsville trains that long had rockabyed me?

Sprung rubber alarm clock: it bounced apart All over him: boingg: it loves him to death. The rubber loops contort, their moil and clench Rockabyeing him out of this world.

A contact lens may become scratched, chipped, discolored, contaminated, coated, warped, or desiccated. Poorly fit, it feels like grit or rockabyes out of the eyes.

She, I noticed, was smiling, but that baby in the treetop might well have smiled as the wind rockabyed her down.

Go to sleep, my darling boy, while mother rockabyes you with her tender hand.

He briefly rockabyed the tallow-colored visage in his arms, then with sudden unconcern handed it to Murph.

Introibo, Here comes the Husband! View Halloo! Think of the North Pole, breathe in; I’ll buy you jewels, keep for me your keynote of martyrdom! Hey, rockabyed baby, is that everything? You’ve nothing more to say?

Simple as a child at night who dreams it’s light, he was light. Fallen. Rockabyed.

Down behind the piano Larry’s dragging out a shiny cylinder—of oxygen! Tenderly, he rockabyes it: “My baby Seymour—as in ‘emphyseymour.’ Next time I’ll bring his sister Ivy—I promise! She’s all tied up now in the ‘I-See-YOU.’”

He closes his eyes and rockabyes his head.

As always, there are other things going on, notably a child being sung and rocked—rockabyed—to sleep.

“Oh, well”—throwing up her fingers with drollery in her little flippant way—“we all go soppy for one third of our lives when baby’s ‘up a tree’ rockabyeing … But I can be pretty queerish in sleep; have visions, intuitions.[…]”

He takes out a dollar bill and lets go of it. It rockabyes to the sidewalk behind him, somersaults into the lawn, gets trapped by the blades of grass, and flaps there like a wounded bird.

He’d been rockabyeing in a rockingchair, then on the bed, thickly rumpled.

The mild sunlight everyone takes for granted—the girl scraping out a sandcastle’s moat, the old man in the park sleeping as the sun rockabyes him—would incinerate you.

A vrrr, vrrr, cruck, cruck, cruck lullaby finally rockabyed me back to sleep.

All the lullabies of the world suggest undulatory movements or rockabyes in the tree tops.

This is what Eve was thinking as she listened to the dance music swinging like a rockabye hammock hung between the silky strands of[…]

Every forty-five minutes occurred A Laugh, selected sea-chanties were alternately mumbled and roared, and the saddest intermission orchestra I have ever heard fiddled jigs and reels to a rockabye tempo.

Carruthers’ sobs have a rockabye beat.

ROCKABYE HAMMOCK. Grown-ups aren’t the only ones who love the sunny laziness of a hammock, so this one has been designed for children between the ages of four and ten.

I have been a rockabye baby sloshed in the sludge of the sea and I have clung with a shell over me waiting a tide to bring me breakfast.