in the monastery of electromagnetic love
1.
Lights flash
and little Tesla
does not see
the way people would like
2.
Say a word:
candle, ax, windmill:
he sees it so real he reaches
out; sees it in four languages.
No different to him than the sewing needle
in your hand, a bean.
3.
Are there tintypes
of the child,
Nikola, in the garden
devising miniature turbines
powered by June bugs,
does he smile?
4.
Serbian boy
living inside his head,
where he ran his idea
machines, finding the flaws
as they turned and ground
in his mind's eye,
no concrete
models required.
5.
In Prague signals bombard
him from far planets.
He chooses celibacy, marries
electricity, like nuns
marry Jesus. Ecstatic
when power arcs
and surges.
6.
No winking or back
slapping, no knack
for the Capitalist way—
big deals, bigger names:
Westinghouse, Morgan.
No time for anything
that's not irresistible.
7.
Visitors' day in Colorado Springs:
he juggles the red fireball
in his hands, touches
it to his rumpled suit, hair.
He lowers it into a wooden box.
Nothing's singed.
The End.
8.
"Many of us sing
but there may not always be someone
who listens," you said.
The world turned a deaf ear
to your death ray. How
could they make war
anymore if armies knew
how to stop each other
in their tracks?
9.
He mulls & mutters
with the pigeons, who understand
the fire that streams
through everything: oak
and river and soil, enervating
the simplest act. Plucking a string,
scratching words on paper.
10.
It was not the pigeons
who extracted every paper
and notebook, scoured
the flat before the world knew
you were gone, feared
your scribbled pages
more than lightning.
Lynn Pattison's poems have appeared in The Notre Dame Review, Heliotrope, Rhino, Dunes Review, Controlled Burn, and On Spec, among others, and been anthologized in several venues, including The Best of Branches 2004, and Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory, (Ed. Sean Miller & Shveta Verma, June, 2008). Pattison, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, is the author of two chapbooks: tesla's daughter (March St. Press, 2005) and Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press, 2006) and the book, Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press, 2006).
