Our Lady Of The Electrical Substation
By Jeffrey Schultz
He’d been a tourist in churches, there for a look at the glass
and a half-hearted pang of the sublime beneath vaulted ceilings,
But there was always the fickering silhouette of some woman
who prayed over a candle she’d lit; then the guilt
Of the faithless would usher him out to afternoon’s heat-
dazzled streets. After the corner store’s worn linoleum
And six pack, he wondered if he could feel anything holy
given years of the nightly news’s nightly war, given
His wife’s retelling of her days working with abused
and molested children. So when he came across these
Beautiful, deadly coils risen up toward heaven and the power
lines that converged in a perfect cage to hold it back,
He couldn’t explain the current that ran through him,
except to say the hum of it, the substation’s carcinogenic
Psalm, seemed to cycle at the same rate as the soul,
which stirred slightly from its hibernation
In the unpainted apse at the back of its hermetic cell.
