Live Wires
Jan 3 2014


Thin black wires
strung along the road
seem to hum, in summer,
drooping, from pole-to-pole
as if overcome
by heat.

In winter, they look frigid
dripping icicles, limned with snow,
brittle enough to snap
in the first stiff wind.
Live wires,
dangling, dancing
showering sparks.

Plunged into darkness,
and a dense silence
with its own dark weight
that made all the absent sounds
of a humdrum house
uncomfortably loud.
When a truck hit the shoulder
took out a pole
blacking us out.
When a storm
ripped down the wires,
like a flimsy clothesline, overloaded,
helter-skelter

on the ground.

They are always there
as I drive along,
straight wooden poles
regular as clockwork
I long ago stopped noticing.

Grim sentries

at attention

no matter what the weather.

And their wires, overhead

are flimsy life-lines,
like the thin thread

of contingency
on which everything depends.
The bad decision

and split-second difference.

The near miss, and sheer coincidence,
the critical bit

you couldn't predict.

In white-out conditions

of wind-driven snow.

The intersection
of quiet country roads.

That patch of ice,
crossing the centre-line
out of control.

The poem ends with an impending head-on collision, an example of the improbable intersections in time and space that can dramatically change a life 180 degrees.

This isn't the first time I've written about contingency, or used the "thin thread" analogy. Perhaps it comes to mind again because I've been binge-watching the first few season of the great HBO series Six Feet Under. Each episode begins with a mundane event in some random life. The viewer knows they will die unexpectedly in the next few minutes. And it is because they're normal people doing everyday things that we so easily identify, that we are so poignantly reminded of life's frailty: the arbitrary contingency, "the bad decision(s) and split-second difference(s) ...and sheer coincidence(s)" that stalk our every move.

When I sat down to write and was trying to think of something from the boring narrative of my own life to get me started, I thought about driving my familiar country road, and a picture came to mind of the overhead wires that run along it: in this extreme cold, a thin black line set against January's bleak snow. This led me to recall one of our numerous black-outs, in this case a bit of mystery because there was no high wind or freezing rain or lightning -- the usual causes. Apparently, the unexpected cause was a truck running into a hydro pole.

So all this comes together in the poem, with consequences that escalate from a downed clothesline to downed power lines to instant death. And where that thin black line of electric wires is a metaphor for the lifeline, the "thin thread/ of contingency/ on which everything depends."

I'm concerned that the poem takes a sudden turn in the last stanza: that the dire ending comes out of nowhere; which is at best a kind of cheating, and at worst leaves the reader confused. But if it works, it's because of those 3 crucial lines in the 3rd stanza, which are a kind of foreshadowing: "when a truck hit the shoulder/ took out a pole/ blacking us out." So instead of coming out of the blue, the ending is more of a call-back, and the poem coheres.