KXOT Presents

Tami Kosch
07/08/2008

Poet Laureate of Tacoma William Kupinse reads the first of three poems recorded for KXOT on location around Tacoma. Cushman Substation. Also a walking tour of Ruston witrh Karen Pickett of the blog Ruston Home.

CUSHMAN SUBSTATION

That Filippo Marinetti, the caffeine of modern Europe,
(by which we mean the nineteen teens) 
sought to electrify the soil of Italy 
(shaped like an aircraft carrier, not a boot, he said), 
seems commonsense as I survey
the field of glossy transformers planted 
in white gravel two city blocks squared,
headquartered in a Greek revival temple.
 
Or when, after years of biking past the substation,
I read the Tacoma Sunday Ledger
from February 28, 1926.  How long did the staff writer
wait to use Herculean without hyperbole?
 
Many Interesting Devices fill the broadsheet encomium: 
analogy (a circuit breaker cutting off the current 
translates to halting a million horses 
in one-tenth of a second-whoa);
anecdote (the engineers took samples
of each tenth bag of concrete for the dam);
hypothesis (the synchronous condenser's 39-ton rotor 
balances so perfectly on oil-floated bearings,
a man may turn it with his hand).
 
Who would have thought the music of the spheres was scored
by boys who squinted hard in math class?
Who would have guessed the trope of reigned-in horses
marked the turn to the future's unrepentant progress?
 
Condenser Heats Building, which is "pleasantly warm,"
a heated wading pool is planned for lucky children.
Where is it now?
 
Complex Frameworks undergird all monuments:
a hierarchy of slaves, the pyramids;
moieties and lost groves the Easter Island heads;
here Dugan & Chrisman, served by General Electric
(shouldn't it be the other way around?)
wrap up work a year to the day.  
But what about the men and women's lives?
If Cushman is no Gauley Bridge, 
was no one crushed, did no one breathe cement dust,
was not a finger lost to dynamite?
Was no homestead drowned, did no one divorce?
I realize that I've come upon this scene
too late for the last century.
 
Wires Are Concealed within the station's shrine, 
but stitched and hung elsewhere,
a garland for the Great War vets who made it home.   
From Cushman Dam's arched concrete shoulders bracing 
the Skokomish's North Fork, threading 
through the Narrows Bridge, festooning 
the esplanade of North 21st Street, convening 
at the substation, before the great transubstantiation
the sends the juice to each suburban home.
 
Much Oil is Used, though not then PCBs,
which waited for invention.  Hydro's fairly clean,
displaced animals and farmers notwithstanding,
drowned native sites and petroglyphs aside.
Still, write the country's history without oil's glossy sheen.
 
Devices Almost Human need no staff,
but Tacoma Power's P.R. agent's 
kind enough to ask if the station doors can open for me.
They can, and while I wait for them to be unlocked,
I content myself with visions of Frankenstein and Nikola Tesla,
and my intent, the next time a student asks how 
to write a ten-page paper in a weekend,
to point my finger skyward and intone "electricity."
And when at last my mind goes silent,  
I at once can hear the landlocked finned transformers
singing their electric song 
just below the human scale.

© Copyright 2008, William J. Kupinse.
Please do not re–use them without permission.