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Literature Text
Power is the skyward sweep of silent marble
up the domineering walls of the electric company.
In my smallness my father took me
to the company office, there not for business
but to see the fish in the company pond.
They awed me even in my youth.
There, leaning into the opaque water,
I waited.
And there, out of the shallow deep,
a streak of red, a formless black.
Like lightning in malevolent skies
or lurking beneath the city streets.
Power is the pirarucu:
a vast monstrosity, a foreign leviathan,
gliding noiseless and soulless
through swamps of a million centuries.
Smaller fish spin helpless in its wake.
A pirarucu is primeval as they come,
more god than fish in its timelessness.
Oh, and there were two.
I followed it, drawn for an eternity
until it vanished under a bridge.
A tiny ripple, a spark of red, and that was all.
… Or was it? No one could tell
where it might surface next.
We had to go and pay the electric bill.
I followed my dad from the pond, from the office,
cold shadow of another family in control.
Power is the same family still in business
after all these decades, far into the dimming past.
They stretch through time like a pirarucu's scales.
Even after all these years
the deepwater lightning still strikes my memory
and reminds me of one simple, brutal fact:
Power is.
(August 2013)
A poetry exercise for our Creative Writing class.
Based on true events; when I was younger we'd go visit the power company, and gaze at the giant fishes swimming in the long, linear pond circling the main building. I'd never seen a fish that big.
The pirarucu (or arapaima) is a giant freshwater fish from the Amazon. It can grow bigger than a human (over 2 m/6.5 feet) and weigh hundreds of pounds. It's also nearly as old as the dinosaurs. The ones I saw were only about 1 m or so, but especially in my boyhood that seemed huge to me already (imagine if I saw a full-sized one!).
The power company owns the pirarucus. The family controlling the power company really did own it for several decades already, in addition to their sugar, telecommunications, real estate and media holdings.
Based on true events; when I was younger we'd go visit the power company, and gaze at the giant fishes swimming in the long, linear pond circling the main building. I'd never seen a fish that big.
The pirarucu (or arapaima) is a giant freshwater fish from the Amazon. It can grow bigger than a human (over 2 m/6.5 feet) and weigh hundreds of pounds. It's also nearly as old as the dinosaurs. The ones I saw were only about 1 m or so, but especially in my boyhood that seemed huge to me already (imagine if I saw a full-sized one!).
The power company owns the pirarucus. The family controlling the power company really did own it for several decades already, in addition to their sugar, telecommunications, real estate and media holdings.
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