At work, as part of orientation training, my husband says they've been watching videos that illustrate the dangers of high voltage electrocution: men climbing atop trains grab cables either accidentally or on purpose, and almost instantly their bodies explode like fireballs. Buckling from the unimaginable energy of 25,000 volts, their bodies char like coal and just like that, nothing remains except a little ash, a little dust that flies off into the wind without a trace. Perhaps, at the moment he and his colleagues were finishing up the last of their required disaster viewing, my students and I were reading a short essay which compared poetry to an event like the formation of constellations millions of years ago, after a star exploded and died. Can you give to someone else what has been? The writer said, the task of the poet is to allow others to wonder at explosions. In this country, around 400 deaths per year are caused by high-voltage electrical injuries; 50 to 300 people die from being struck by lightning, though at least 30,000 suffer minor shocks that don't result in death. Blue or white-hot and crackling, electricity only wants to ground itself—which is why electricians set up ground wires outside the house for the current to find a path back to the earth. What was there until it wasn't anymore; and how much of what is volatile can we safely conduct through thickets of exchange? We don't see how or where, but everything is always bristling. Everything.
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