Off the edge of the Allegheny locks,
nestled in the scrap yard, stood
a bright red fire truck
with nothing more to say to anyone
about anything regarding history
much less how it came to rest,
so many years out of time,
beside the orange streaked brown body
of a tanker car with no more track to tread
and the head of a caramel and 70's
kitchen appliance green
tractor to whom no trailer would
be caught hitched unless it was dead.
Fashionably late, are we?
I am, fingers through chain link
that has seen no days more lively
than the industrial slump, overhead with
Totsy and Nod and we are
poking the grump with our eyes,
breaths caught steaming in Winter's coming,
as we wonder
where you've been all our lives.
I would buy it too. Drive it to work
and park it across four white divided lanes
like the king it is.
Tonight it is gone. Gone beneath the giant.
The magnet as wide as my kitchen
that grasps a magnificently clear,
from afar, silver orb
and then drops it through the metal skins
of things discarded
like a kid with too many toys
and not enough fireworks, matches, imagination or butane
to make things more interesting.
Now we stand,
the gang all here without you,
wondering where grumps went.
Our fingers slink away
from the fence lining the bridge above the scrap yard
and the neon bright green water
at the center of the pit the silver ball has torn into the Earth
and our fancies, like dogs ears pricked false
by mailmen who have already come and gone
and crossing the quietude of the disappointment
by filling the air with tales of other tennis balls
you would have to see to believe.
The gangs all here.
This one time I saw this fire truck in noontime daylight.
It was amazing. Where did you go?
