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A.J. Rathbun Electric --for Grady Wilcher The hard curving concrete branches out from a ridge of mud-strewn grass and it's easy to crouch and watch ants around the dead possum's mouth. Months had carried the heft and flesh away like sand. Like sand, snow blew the body into a white mound, bones against a rind of pear-colored skin. Sun glances in glittering ribbons off the possum, ants trace genealogies without noticing the light they give and take. Grown men cried when Nicolai Tesla chandeliered cable over the Chicago Exhibition in 1893, arching inviolable lines of alternating current after verdigral afternoon coasted into the dark a damp plum has coating its outer layer. And then light. And then the inner frame of diamonds. But I've left the possum now. I've left the whole block to grasp the night sky and wring it until I know everything, feverish white pigeon feathers covering Tesla's hotel room the day he died, the wet alley you overdosed in, the curious rumble pigeons make, breath weighing enough to slow and curl around the ribs it passes, the gathering sound of passage from one form to the next, the cabaret of pigeons rumbling while your bicep shook the needle's feet, releasing heroin's rush as a cattail releases white over a pond. You didn't die alone. There were pigeons. It may be you are gone. The night I pretend to hold is smaller. Sky is fading as streetlights encroach with all the stubbornness of turtles, just like Tesla would have wanted after he fell out of history. Whole yellow lines, like long-blooming sunflowers, cut continents into a furious wave eclipsing, blending, and it may not be you are gone, it may be only that electricity is a vacuum, nighttime one more artifact I find myself losing. A.J. Rathbun has had poems in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Poetry Miscellany, Monster, Pontoon, The Sonora Review, Weber Studies, ZYZZYVA, and others, and is currently co-editor of LitRag, an international journal of poetry, fiction, and art that is based in Seattle. |
