Fire Engine God Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If you are brown and you do not love:
If you are a forest underground, or in the sea;
Or if you are a homing pigeon or a turtle dove
Who never returns with
Offerings of peace:
Then I know you, and you are just the traffic
Stopped for a pace of a light cycle-
Maybe you turn and look at my star fruit tree,
Maybe you halfway come to the conclusion to
Think of me, your stomach, your engine rumbling:
Maybe you are an airplane hovering in close
Space- Maybe you are just opening,
Spreading pedals or spokes, something beautifully
Concentric and round, but you don’t consider for
Long- and there you go on your way,
Shampooed and legged in your pierce-nosed
Parade- Once all my fireworks are spent and left
To just smoldering surcease, and there are better
Boys happening just nearly in the east:
And you go that way, and they flex anchors for you,
And I die exhausted, and happy that you stopped
And maybe were pensive and thirsty for the weight
Of a hummingbird carried in the matted hair of
A saber tooth tiger on the lam from a fire engine god.