A Single Thin Wire

Jan 2 2018

So cold

you wonder if eyeballs can freeze.

And recall stories of hypothermia,

where men strip off their clothes

in some bizarre illusion of heat;

not such a bad end, we're told

if you had your choice of deaths.

A single hydro line

spans 2 toothpick poles

a hundred feet apart;

one leaning, where the ground has settled,

the other anchored

in a barrel of rocks.

A thin black wire,

tethered to the house

like an insubstantial thread;

an umbilicus

feeding the fridge, the stove

the heat, the lights

the water pump

the phone,

a life-line

keeping out the cold.

In a bitter wind

it swings sharply back and forth,

weighed down

by a brittle crust of ice.

A single thin wire

all that's connecting me

to the warm civilized world,

at the distant end

of an intricate journey

that begins in a turbine or boiler

then runs a through a high-voltage corridor

sub-station, hub, transformer

branch-line, breaker, fork.

An arithmetic of failure

I can't help but add in my head;

a truck, plowing into a pole

a momentary overload.

Nevertheless

the electricity flows, the furnace rumbles.

And my eyeballs have yet to freeze,

that shock-wave of cold

give way to numbness.

So much we take for granted.

A single wire, thinner than my thumb.

The thickness of a wall

in a small cerebral artery.

A fist-sized heart

that beats-and-beats-and-beats

for 90 years

reliably.

Hoping that the ground has fully settled

and the wind subsides

and there are no bald tires

or drowsy drivers

or slick black ice.

. . . For tonight, at least.

The cold snap is over. But I think it was deep and prolonged enough to justify a second poem in a row that begins So cold ... !

This piece was inspired by a terrific piece in this week's New Yorker (the Jan 8, 2018 edition) by Siddhartha Mukherjee: My Father's Body, at Rest and in Motion (here's the link:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/my-fathers-body-at-rest-and-in-motion). The connection is almost incidental – one of the analogies he uses – and the only thing it has to do with the theme of Mukherjee's article is the idea of the “cascade of failure”. Nevertheless, I always find it worthwhile documenting the origin story of a poem, while I still remember it.