Blackbird Archive
← v9n1, Spring 2010
Poetry · Volume 9, Number 1

The Electrician’s Mate, 1954

Lesley Wheeler

The steel pin coiled his arm like a filament

in a tungsten bulb. He had tumbled off

a scaffold while wiring neon signs. Now

he could not join the army, hold a gun.

~

The sky burned incandescent overhead.

He steered his family into the cellar,

leaned out with a hissing cigarette, watched,

counted the survivors under his breath.

~

Radium needles were inserted but

escaped, jutting through his skin. He wanted

to see rhododendrons flare awake,

not just the cage of his bed, his cancer.

~

You become your job and miss it more than

your wife, your children. Glass breaks but the current

is live. Anyone can see it leaping

in his eyes, searching for a way out.

illnessfamilywar
Lesley Wheeler

Lesley Wheeler’s chapbook, Scholarship Girl , is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poems appear in AGNI , Prairie Schooner , Barrow Street , The National Poetry Review and other publications. Her second scholarly book, Voicing American Poetry , is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the spring of 2008. She is a co-editor with Moira Richards and Rosemary Starace of Letters to the World , an anthology of poems from members of the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO), forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Wheeler teaches at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.