Light Out of Death

Nesquehoning
   They saw light in the darkbed coal;
   Petrified ancestral heat, caved
   In bituminous gardens, fossiled
   Beneath the graveweight of eons.

Sinnemahoning
   They saw light at the end of a tunnel
   Deveining the ages for generators that
   Burn away stone, reparticularize it
   in microorbital antistars over the air.

Monongahela
   They made the accumulated power
   Of primordial death quicksilver
   Leap its gargantuan spasm
   Into the copper veins of America.

Thos. A. Edison
   Ultimately it will so disorient
   The filaments of the lamp
   That Edison's dream will
   Still come electrically true.

Rappahannock
   Light out of death—the mechanical
   Reignition of lost passion in a silent
   Explosion of air that x-rays the objects
   Of their rooms in the belly of darkness.

Tunkhannock
   It would seem they burn the past
   To see their present, seek their future by;
   Push back dawn and dusk
   By sheer force of vision.

Susguehanna
   But around the bulb
   That last faint reassertion
   Of dinosauric heat has the vague
   Scent of intention in it.