Image from Tesla Memorial Society of New York
In Yugoslavia at the age of six he dreamed
about Niagara and a waterwheel—and years
later dreamed of throwing electricity all
over the world, without wires, to far planets,
people taking what they needed from the air—
Tesla, who championed the alternating current
that lights the earth, who drove Edison mad,
who drove Edison into the public electrocution
of cats and dogs at lectures to demonstrate
the satanic danger of alternating current—
Tesla, who invented the radio before Marconi,
who held computer patents in the 1800s, who
believed high voltage cables running under
classroom floors would stimulate the intellect
of dull students. Who, during the last years
of his life, became a caretaker of park pigeons,
feeding them, even from between his lips,
as they fluttered around his feet, alighted
on his hat, his shoulders, his outstretched
arms, a Saint Nicola of Alternating Current,
gone to the birds. Who now sits brooding
in bronze on Goat Island, larger than life,
still attracting the occasional pigeon as he
sits, open book on his lap, pretending to read
but looking over the heads of wandering tourists
to watch the rush of water surging toward the Falls,
the volume diminishing over the years—dreaming
that soon all the water will stop flowing,
that it will all be turned into electricity,
transforming the earth into a planetary fireball
of lightning, illuminating the furthest reaches
of the dark universe, beyond our imaginations.
Source: E. R. Baxter III. Niagara Lost and Found: New and Selected Poems. Yarmouthport, MA: Abyss Publications, 2013.
