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THE LONGEST LIGHTBULB
		based on a newspaper story
		about a bulb that has lasted a
                                        hundred years, and counting.

Just when imagination has died out
like the ivory-billed woodpecker,

a curved filament in glass shines
in a place we’ve been before.

It lit up the uniform of the Great War,
the shirt-waist with a pleated front,

a mirror’s self-kiss, the first kiss, the wrong kiss,
the suicide, the hem, the washing machine wringer.

Orange/red-hot shimmy inside transparency,
it lights images of a hundredth year, casts

shadow over a shoulder
that squares itself in a very old doorway.

Undying incandescence,
with you come the sweet colognes,
dark molasses of autumn,
and something beyond the front porch, barely,
out there in the oaks.

© Copyright, Anne Harding Woodworth.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.