Ride the Lightning

By Garth Robinson

Photo Credit: EESOFUFFZICH

Only today I learned what this really means, and

what a dumb meaning, because doesn’t it sound like

something magnificent, something kin to flight?

This is what I’d like for it to mean: Today I tried 

to explain to my students how a poet might use 

empty space. You have more than one tool, I said.

You have more than words. Somehow my class this fall

is eight boys: gentle, hard-headed, wonderful and 

impossible. They’re looking at me the way you’d look

at a man conjuring spirits. And I could go on, but it is

the last day in September and outside the air is fuzzy 

& thick, as if with fur, and there’s little else to do but

walk the gravel road up and away towards the woods, 

past the old pond, the potato field, past the honeysuckle

sketching latticework in the space between fence posts. 

The afternoon brings such fistfuls of beauty. But the 

boys are quiet, walking as if numb, until we get to a turn-

around where someone has parked a big yellow excavator.

I wonder if they left the keys in there, one of them says. They

jump up on the muddy tracks, cup their hands against the 

glass of the cab. No keys in there. But this doesn’t bother them,

and they walk around the excavator, they inspect the under-

carriage, they take turns suspending each of their separate weights 

against the edge of the dirty, steel-plated bucket. To each other,

as if I were not there, they maneuver imaginary joysticks along

imaginary tracts, they lift imaginary weights & deposit them

heavy on imaginary earth. I know I should be hurrying them back 

to class, but it is difficult when they act like this, when they are so 

happy to see this machine that they know is a marvel. It strikes me

again that they are only boys, and by that I mean only children, and

by that I mean to tell them each: 

ride the lightning ride the lightning ride the lightning. 

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Garth Robinson lives and teaches in Annapolis, Maryland. He holds an MFA from Hollins University. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in DIAGRAM, Oyster River Pages, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Variant Literature, and elsewhere.

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