Read More: A Q&A with Joel Peckham
Tesla’s Tower
–for Rachael
There’s this image I keep thinking of: the scientist
seated on a fold-out chair, unimpressed, and reading
a paper in his lab in Colorado Springs as if a storm
of his own making didn’t crackle just above his head,
its lightning fracturing the 22-foot gap between electrode
and capacitor. A publicity shot meant to “spark”
the interest of investors in ideas too big to be believed
Though I think it may be even harder not to—
conceive of waves that ride the curve, the surface
of the earth or go down deep into the ground
through root and bone, body to body, then course
the upper atmosphere where air is thin
and everything flows with nothing to impede it.
On the last night before the fall that took him
from her, my mother woke to my father’s hands
running all along her body. He was in home-hospice
then and each day retreating in the static of his brain
until he often couldn’t remember who she was, saying
I need to go home. I have a wife and a family. That night,
she let him touch her everywhere and said, yes love,
I’m still yours. I’m still here.
Dearest,
Sometimes I am so afraid of forgetting
that when I don’t remember—a name, a word, a date,
an appointment—I go silent rather than ask for help.
I’ll misplace the keys or my gloves or my phone,
then storm around the house, frantic, turning over
the pillows on the couch, opening and slamming
doors—to the closet, bathroom, cabinets, refrigerator.
Sometimes I am afraid I will lose you by forgetting
you are there, that you are
you which is to say I am afraid
of misplacing myself
When Tesla died, penniless, alone, the feds
raided his little room above 34th street, emptying
his boxes and crates of plans and dreams—speculative
science: wireless communication, particle beams,
and sketches of the tower, unfinished, except in his mind:
another incomplete experiment at connecting
all of us. Which must have seemed dangerous. Imagine
if we really believed that we were all channeling the same
energy. Would the bombs stop falling? It doesn’t take
an electrical engineer to understand what matters
is not how we connect or why but that we are
connected: everyone and everything a conduit
With the laboratory fully charged, Tesla could light
a bulb just by holding it in his hand. And still, somehow
we remain convinced of our separation. Maybe
that’s less frightening. It’s easier to let go of things if we
are unattached. Better to believe we can survive untethered
unexposed to all that energy. So we make disorders
out of our dependencies. Which is to say we are all disordered,
hopelessly reaching for each other in the dark, the air around us
charged and crackling, suffused with sparks.
Ever Elvis After All
For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion—Albert Einstein
1.
Confused. That’s the word that mom would use when dad could not remember what day or year it was. Or asked if the Pats were on—even though it was 90 degrees in the middle of June. Or told me Elvis wasn’t dead and if he was, He’d know. Or when he called us once from the side of the road in Maine because he couldn’t remember where he was going or how to get back home. And all I can think about was how terrified he must have been. Pulled off on a gravel turnaround surrounded by trees, the rumble of semis shaking the chassis. That was years before we took away his keys. Even for the sharpest mind, the image in the rearview keeps on changing/rearranging in accordance with the way we love and fear, how we construct and reconstruct the story we tell ourselves
2.
about ourselves. Sometimes I’m terrified how easy it can be to change the past with a phrase, a word. The way that April became June just for the sound it made and that thing about Elvis, was it ever Elvis after all? I try not to lie because when I do, it has a nasty habit of becoming the truth—erasing what I’m trying to hold onto. I can’t trust my memory anyway. I think of listening to Aloha from Hawaii on the stereo credenza and how that music filled our living room, pressing the walls outward until it was a stadium, Dad with a beer in his hand and both of us singing. I still love that record, though they played the early stuff too fast as if in a hurry to push through the past in a hail of sweat and rhinestones, so you almost want to shout wait! Slow down! I was only maybe 10 and hadn’t heard the Sun recordings yet, so it was all I knew and more than good enough. Great in fact. That’sAllRightHoundDogTigerManMysteryTrainBlueSuedeShoes. But now that medley feels too much like life, the way it all speeds up, carrying us along like some kid pulled into a storm sewer during a hurricane and I don’t want to go tumbling, flailing all the way
3.
through the tunnel. Maybe the past and present and future are just an illusion and maybe it’s a gift to forget, to lose, the difference, the distinctions. Where up is down and backwards is forwards who cares where we are going. And if it’s all just happening at once, then maybe there’s a place where/when I’m with still him, in the red and white striped Chevy van and its always summer and we’re on the logging road that weaves along the lakes from Oakland to Belgrade and though we’ve made the drive a hundred times we’ve somehow missed a turn and it’s getting dark and the houses and barns more broken down, rotted out, further apart, so we’re just a little nervous though there’s plenty of gas in the tank and we can still turn around and I haven’t yet lost that trust a boy can have in his father to just keep driving until he knows where he is and where he needs to go, and he is still that man, clear-eyed and beautiful with a voice I never tire of listening to. And his favorite team is playing on the radio and Elvis never died and it doesn’t matter where we are, we are leaping through the dark. He will always sing me home.
Earthrise
We came all this way to explore the Moon and the most important thing
Is that we discovered the Earth—William Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut.
1.
To see the earth looming over the plains of the moon
240,000 miles away is to wonder again
like a newborn waving her hands above her own face. I am
sometimes struck dumb, by re-emergence. The old
become new, catching sunlight like a nickel
at the bottom of a stream or gliding into view,
a heron over four-pole creek at dawn 50 yards from my window.
What is love to a widower but fire floating on a starless sea? I wonder […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
___________________________________
Joel Peckham has published eleven collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: new and selected poems (SFAU) and Gone the Sun (UnCollected Press) and the spoken word LP, Still Running: Words and Music by Joel Peckham (EAT poems). With Robert Vivian, he also co-edited the anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. He is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University.
Read More: A Q&A with Joel Peckham