Title to this next poem is from an issue of Ladies' Home
Journal, it happens to be a 1915 issue,
and it was the headline to an article about the invention
of electricity.
You Will Think This Is a Dream.
Hypnotized, it leaps through coiled metal
to drive cauldrons wild in a parenthesis of flame.
Stroke the wall and daylight breaks.
Twist a dial, summer purrs through.
With pocket inferno, light a cigarette
from the succinct chaos with which the universe began.
But in night's other country, where time is mirage,
fire was an animal whose gold flanks scorched
and whose galloping devoured grasslands as it fled.
No one tamed lions, no one dreamed of narrowing frenzy
in its flight.
How shall I explain to my ancient self
the invisible fires we train now as pets, let alone the genie
locked in all living things?
How explain the hibiscus, geranium, and lily
thriving in tropical deceit at my window, beyond which
the park lies drab and frozen?
In a landscape invisible in time and space,
despite both my ignorance and the auroras of fatigue,
I can aim the enemy, I can pipette the sun.
To the lily it's Africa, rampant heat and showers.
But more than glass protects the hothouse flowers.