"Electric"

Great grandparents’ field

That one word, electric, piques interest. The mere word says tell me more. But to be in the sound of it. To be immersed in a sensation and call it electric; put words to how it flows through the body as thrill or danger, or that leading edge of curiosity where your better judgment is barely containable. To test a toe over that line to see if it zaps. To pepper that Do Not Enter sign with bullet holes and run away with that electric rush. There are so many sides to this electric. They all seem to say, Oh, really? Let me remind you of your human bounds.

There was a magical field. Please let me tell this. My great grandparents used to farm potatoes and strawberries there. Much later, long fallow, the field was owned by a great uncle. A shit of a man. He had three fingers on one hand and murky values. One time he “caught us” on the edge of a small pond on his property. We were just kids looking at pond life: bullfrogs, sticklebacks, giant water bugs. He snapped at us as though childhood wonder could be in the wrong. Then, he bent at the waters edge and allowed leeches to crawl up the stumps of his fingers. Intimidation? Straight-faced bid at humor? I’ll never know. He’s dead.

He didn’t deserve to own the magical field. He made a deal with a one-man septic cleaning service. How could it have been worth it? To pump raw human sewage straight from septic tanks onto the field in long raws of gray pulpy stench. What is flushed and spread besides a toxic fertilizer that grows to hide itself? Tampon applicators, Q-tips, pills, accidents and secret things.

But before all that it was a wide open field with a huge lone oak. This is true: the path to the field was a yellow brick road. I don’t know if that man was capable of such a poetic feat. Someone paved a stretch of the path with yellow bricks. There was trash, too, along the way. This was a bad man in possession.

In high school I had a grand mal seizure right there on that yellow brick road. The sun was flashing through the trees and, reacting to my anti-depressant, I collapsed, twitched, and foamed at the mouth. My eyes rolled so far back I was all whites. And my stoned friend stood by helpless in the middle of the forest. This was pre-cell phone era. Just nothing. Then—call it luck or just the way it was—bad uncle came driving along to check on his field. They loaded me in the back seat of his truck and the rest turned out fine. Well, I sometimes get electric zaps in my brain when the sun flashes through the trees or a movie gets excited about itself. I’ll never make it to The Sphere in Vegas or a Berlin discotheque. The doctor said I might attract lightning.

All of that detail was the “narrative hook.” Irrelevant to the point, maybe. So, back to electric. Before it all, the shit and leeches, I used to approach the opening to that field, where the path dumped out to its gentle grandeur, with silent footfall. Scanned for deer and sandhill cranes. Proceeded into the wonder that my great grandparents left behind. A weathered wooden outhouse had folded in on itself, but right there, baring it all from the long grass, its good old two-seater. There was the oak, of course. Its trunk hugged with field stones. Tiny warm strawberries before it all went sour. It was a good field, then. You could pat its back and say, Good field. It shrank with the years as blackberry brambles and quaking aspen wanted to be a part of it. And I’d stand there in the heat of summer and hear something. It sounded electric. It sounded urgent. It surrounded me with defiance of source. The sound was real. This is not a metaphor.

Something might have been alerting me to an encroaching wildfire. No smoke. Something telling me that summer had gotten too hot. The land was inflamed and about to cross the line. But no, nothing came after the sound. I was in no danger at all. Its particular hertz was its own constancy and I was to have no business with it.

I can still hear it. Not out there, but I remember clearly what it was like to feel engulfed and insignificant. Yet, willing to fight for my life. I could outrun the worst back then, but not electric sound. That required strong surrender. Sometimes that’s the definition of wonder, but only sometimes.

Are you sometimes the only one who hears it? Something electric, defying reason, and in control? You surrender to the fact that you’re alone with whatever it’s telling you or whatever you have no business with. Listen and leave it. Like a little glittering something too high to be reached, hanging on an invisible threat, twinkling in the breeze, and you just watch and let it. Walk away, pleased with your secret unknowing.

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Sometimes my poems are too dense and sometimes they seem too simple. Sometimes I pick at them, sometimes I let the mystery stick. How often do you feel your writing is about the unknowing? How can we simultaneously polish our writing and preserve the unknowing? Beyond that, center it. The grit of preservation is what I love in reading. I want things left unknown and watch what humans do with it.

I woke up this morning with this and I’ll just let it be here:

I Know a Place

Why does the sky sound electric,
standing in a field,
miles from powerlines?

Why, face to sky, is it buzzing
without cicadas
or crickets or birds?

Why is the sky tinnitus
without planes or flies,
without my humming?

There’s no forest service siren,
no alert at all,
but this emergency:

I had to get here, face to sun,
cooperate for once,
with no idea why.