"An enormous electro-magnet is used to steal the world's electricity"

- Plot summary of a 1925 novel in a

catalogue of "Classic Fantastic Literature"

Elsewhere, drowned Atlantis is found (populated;

difficulty than you've endured in searching

for your car keys. Elsewhere, isotopes of "flightium"

allow a locomotive-looking "sky ship" to ascend

to Mars: it turns out that the lost (no longer) tribes

of Israel live here now, in grandiose enclosures

underground, beneath those strings of roseate lesions

on the surface -it's a narrative that mixes

sober Pentateuchal sweep with the pulpier world

of space-age brawls and gutsy space-age femmes fatales.

Elsewhere, an immortality pill. Elsewhere, attack

by martial "lizard men" is foiled by "magnetic coil

thruster beams" a rogue inventor cooks up in a tipsy spree.

These stories test, or are, the distant edges of belief;

although inventing a credible sunrise in a Minnesota

small town on a winter day in 1948 . . . its orange fingers

on the lake ice, and the human lives this light awakes

in touching them: the quietly expectant,

and the fearful, the fatigued . . . is no less category "fiction"

than some sun that sends out zooming fleets of alien invaders

to our own. The heat of each is equally real

(or equally dubious). In the catalogue of "naturalistic

twentieth-century fiction," in the houses of growing up

in Newkirk, Catiesville, Lake Ketchawan,

the difficult lessons-and also the wonders-are plentiful,

on the journey to something so galactically far away

as womanhood or manhood. In a country just done dealing

with the holocaustal touch of World War II, a couple

labors to believe, still, in a monitory God

whose will is basically benign; and elsewhere, say

in Northern Corners or in Endersburg, another couple

works to believe, oh works so hard

across a plot as long as a life, to simply believe

in a premise as tough as monogamy.

Structure

37 lines · 3 stanzas