Communing with coyotes in the desert is an "essential endeavor", I think... These poems of the desert pull at a part of me, Cali'... My love for the Sonoran desert runs very deep. It has been far too long... ZW
what's really terrifying is too realize how trivial most of the communication going over those crackling lines really is...
Thank you all so much for your comments. I was actually halfway proud of this poem. It's heartening to see that people really do get it.
Thank you again. It was funny, writing this. I got the idea one day last spring while walking on an actual abandoned pole line road in the desert near my house. The wind was pretty brisk and you could hear the hum from a quarter-mile away. At first I thought it was the wires humming, but when I got closer, I discovered it was the poles themselves making the sound, which I thought was weird. I wrote one or two lines that day, but couldn't figure out what I wanted to say. I just knew the image was very powerful and there ought to be something there. Then one day last week it suddenly hit me that it was all about making connections between people. That's what the wires do. I also liked the almost throwaway image of meeting your own footsteps going in the other direction, which also happened to me that day in the desert. What a powerful image ... meeting your own self coming and going, making a two-way connection to yourself. Thanks again to everyone who read this.
It was the insulator strings. It is actually normal for insulators to buzz on high voltage power lines.
But they only hum like that when the wind is blowing. I know because I've been back to the same road since.
