Power Stations

You’d think that, from a height, they’d disappear,

but astronauts report you still can see them

when so many other vivid features

disappear from view: these ganglia of wire,

rods and pistons, conical high towers

rising in a forest or on distant plains,

elaborately hidden from the common view.

A few of them, like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl,

call attention to themselves like teens

who suddenly must walk on some wild side.

They ruin everything around them, fail

at school, wind up in rehab or the local jail.

Their reputations never will recover,

but their peers still hide and power on.

I came upon one in its monstrous glory

in the summer woods, leafing my way

through vast anthologies of heavy foliage.

For a brief while, standing in that vision,

I was all ablaze, part of its story.

Even now, far from that luminary site,

I feel the surge, the tingle, coming through.