Thunder opens the poem as a laugh: "the laugh of a vengeful god / Whose teeth are crimson." It's a strange, slightly savage image, and it sets the question the rest of the poem keeps circling. Is this god a symbol "Of love or self destruction"? The speaker then adds, almost casually, "And whether those are actually the same thing." That line is the poem's real engine. What follows is a small drama in which two people try to bargain with the idea of forever, and the weather refuses to tell them whether they are lovers, worshippers, or victims.
The poem's key word is "ambiguity," and it keeps coming back. The god's nature is ambiguous, the woman's gaze has "just as much ambiguity," and the rain "refused to lessen the ambiguity." Repeating a word about uncertainty so often is a clever move, because the poem becomes quite certain about one thing: nothing here will be settled. Even the grammar joins in. The pronouns slide, so that "him" at the start seems to mean the god, while "he" later kneels and prays, apparently a human man. The poem never marks the handover. A reader can reasonably take this as deliberate, since god and worshipper blur just as love and self-destruction do.
The central drama is a request. He asks her to "let him feign worship of her," which is a revealing phrase. He wants to kneel before a "concrete idol," and "concrete" is a good choice, since it means both tangible and hard, unyielding. He isn't asking for real devotion, only permission to pretend. Yet what he begs for is enormous: "the void of forever." Calling forever a "void" is telling. It sounds less like a promise than an emptiness, something you could fall into. Her reply is tiny by comparison: "Just for a second." Set the second against forever and you have the poem's whole irony. Her eyes turn "perfectly the color / Of their thundering god's teeth," so she briefly takes on the god's crimson, and her answer carries the same double meaning as his. It could be tenderness or a refusal.
The poem has no rhyme and no steady meter. It is free verse, built from short lines that often break mid-thought: "Whether he was symbolic / Of love or self destruction." These enjambed breaks give the sentences a hesitating, wondering quality, as if the speaker were thinking aloud. Without rhyme to tie things off, the lines drift. That lack of closure suits a poem about questions that cannot be answered, and the long sentence about forever "plaguing / The answer to any particular question" is exactly what it describes, a thought that won't finish cleanly.
The ending is the poem's most striking decision. After the rain falls "on them / Both like they were just one," the final lines break apart and step down the page: "To / each / drop / of / rain." The staircase of words imitates falling water, and it also slows the reading to one word at a time, so that we experience a few seconds stretched out. The last claim is the most surprising. The couple are "proved" to be "giants" to each raindrop. Giants are enormous only next to something tiny and brief. So the poem's answer to its question about forever is not an answer. These two people, who wanted infinity, become huge only in relation to a fleeting drop. Whether that is comfort or mockery is left open, in keeping with the ambiguity the poem never lets go of.
Nothing reliable can be said here about who wrote it or when, so the poem has to stand on what is on the page. What makes it worth reading is its nerve. It sets a vast subject beside a very small one, thunder beside a whisper and forever beside a second, and then builds its form to carry that tension. The poem doesn't resolve whether love and self-destruction are the same thing, but it makes the possibility feel real, and it leaves the reader standing in the rain with it.