100 Watts

My page is illumined at night
by yellow-white light
from a frosted glass bulb
glowing bright with the shock
flowing hot through the wall,

the banks of breakers,
the ranks of transformers,
the maze of wires stretched pole to pole
along streets, around corners,
up the legs of gray metal titans,
through cables strung in catenaries
two hundred feet up
and down the rolling hills
on paths shaved smooth of trees,

spliced, at the ends, to dynamos,
megawatt turbines spinning
in the roar of steam from boilers
fired with oil and coal--
black ooze, pumped from wells,
black rock, gouged from seams,
the fermented rot of green
from the Age of Ferns,
submerged in the crush
of miles underground and aeons ago,
before dinosaurs shook the rocks,
when monster fronds unfurled
in swamps nourished by the Sun,

our native star, radiant, roiling
beneath feathers of prominence and flare,
a maelstrom of hydrogen become helium --
a nuclear furnace, forged from clouds
once cold and dark,
pressed toward collapse
by a passing wave from a dying star --
a descendant of the first suns,
methusalehs who coalesced from fire
that sprang from a singular point

when the Egg cracked,
when nothing became something,
when God shouted
"Let there be Light"
by which I write.

Scott Speck
02/19/2000