Power Lines Along the Coast - Poetry Northwest

Photo by Jan Huber

Power Lines Along the Coast

Vacant staff for music I can’t see

Rules for runaway cursive out to the far end of the page

Swoop after swoop sinking the way a person slides

Steadily from her own life narcotic moon the bedrail’s horizon

Faint vibrato down the wire     

Headlong for the waves     

The air is full of waves our choir teacher said on Saturdays fixing metal quarter

notes to her metal board

Holding them up magnetic pills

Full of a tune so mighty it must be conducted diminuendo

Station by station

As if from under the roar of dams     

A shocked cord lacing each pole the one line hitched to our house a blistering

hymn

Where the last switch hummed and the throat was a socket 

We opened to sing

- Published in a slightly different form by Poetry Northwest, Summer & Fall 2023