To Say Her Amen's Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I will not answer again:
My words will fall against the easel- they will
Fall broken hearted through the clouds
And their friends are hoed from the amusements
Of personified rainstorms:
And it will be as if something beautiful came out
Of the student parking lot between classes,
And cursed
And showed its speckled wings before lunch
Before returning in again:
And it was true, before my car was keyed:
That this was my heart,
And I hungered toward you almost as extinct as
A panther even while the Indians were
Shooting their arrows and showing their
Rib cages:
That I tried this way, escaping into the spotlights,
Despoiling myself for the science experiments:
That I became untrue and un unified:
As your sisters sat out upon the bleachers and cried
For me,
And ate their sugary nudity- and grew forked
Tongues and in their beauty knew of the tide’s surceases,
But even in their pagan apertures could not save me-
As I was a happenstance for you, growing wings
Neither large enough to fly or escape from harm:
I sat at the end of the fire escape and did mathematics
Habitually, and waited out the hours
And sucked my thumb underneath the armpits of firemen
Who scrambled like red ants up the Ferris Wheels
Just to get a chance to bid for you before you moved
Away again- the way a fire moves through
A forest,
Or the way a lonely housewife lies down to say her amen’s.