If It Was Your Happy Birthday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Like puppies who somehow shut up at the sight
Of the next round of glorious sunset coming through
Your window,
Like a glorious tsunami that the clown fish have been
Dreaming up
In their tanks in those shops, dimes of water filling their
Gills like breastfeeding;
But you are already gone down the other side of the hill,
Your pail empty,
Your daughter starving though next month will be her
Birthday:
And I am the bank robber, or I am the fox,
My easily avoided arrowhead shot near your shoulder bade
Like the tattoo of a windmill temping you to surrender;
And I am the ever so many things that you have never
Picked up to read:
I am an entire library at the bottom of the oceans of my hell:
Your body is an orchard running away into the gloom
Of a preposterous family,
Rootless, telling each other nightmares, while you get off work
And take your high schooled sisters to the mall,
The airplanes floating above your head like the perusing
Majesty of obese angels;
While your religion remains back in Mexico in a Virgin emblazoned on
Some disbelieving farmer’s 15th century cloak;
But I will chase you like an adolescent fox plays with a hyperventilating
Butterfly through the forest,
Until we both exhaust and lay like a rookery of fire engines fallen down
From the steep slopes of the airy basins;
And then the greenness will sing to us, as if it was your happy birthday,
And all around will be painted your favorite color.