This got us thinking about poetry, and between the crickets and a turn in the weather, we are feeling summer's end.
This poem is set in the wrong season, but the mood of change seems right. It's an equinoctial pivot. Recently we had our first fall ale, a brown seasonal, and it was tasty. We're craving heavier, richer flavors.
The electrification imagery also appeals to our historical interests! Electricity, too, is current*: The Boardman coal plant is in the news again, and electric vehicle changing stations are popping up. So it resonates on multiple levels.
Electricity*har, har!
by Geoffrey Nutter
Children picking through the rocks
beside the river on a spring day.
What are they looking for? Old green
net tangled on broken pilings; a couple
embracing on the tumbledown esplanade.
Some fishermen drinking beer from tall brown bottles.
Broken shells, tire treads, rusted aluminum pull-tabs—
downriver, near the sun, the great echoes
and the embers of the bridge; and upriver,
far away, the echoing spools and dynamos
of the dam, its forces crackling outward
like the giant snow crab's jointed legs,
like a web in sunlight, a net, a chorus
of embers, like a plan the river is planning,
abstract, afire and electric, glowing
in the levitating rubric, invisible,
visible to children, undiscovered:
Brace yourselves—electricity
is coming to us.
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