The repairman arrives at night to fix
the telephone wires fried by lightning.
He unscrews a metal box encasing a joint,
and a tangle of colored cords spills out
like a half-remembered dream. It works,
he says. But it will never be the same.
I stand in the road and watch him
drive into the gray dawn, his palm
held open out the window.
—Polly Buckingham
Polly Buckingham, the recipient of a 2014 Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship, is a creative writing teacher at East Washington University and the author of A Year of Silence.
