Residual Current

After the flash, the laboratory practises stillness:
pliers laid open, glass jars holding
their small clear weather, the steel sink
greying under fluorescent dusk.

On the table, the heart waits
in its cradle of wires.
Lacquer-red, split by a black tributary,
it steams in the old alphabet of burns.

The fault was fast—
a white animal through copper,
then gone. What stayed
is slower: metal taste,

a halo on the tongue,
the scorched patience of insulation.
We trace the failure backwards.
Not love; the instruments refuse

such soft units. Only load,
resistance, heat. Only the safety
chewed open from inside.

Carbon tells the truth
without confession. Under the lens
it branches like a winter tree
struck into the bark of the world.

So we work by increments:
scrape, tin, bridge, test;
scrape, tin, bridge, test.
A fuse wire bends

into its brief obedience.
When the relay closes,
the first beat is ugly—
a knock from a pipe

in a house no one has entered for years.
Then another. Then the room
gives back its held breath.
Dust loosens from the rafters.

The bulb above us steadies,
wearing one blue nerve.

By morning, smoke is only memory
where the ceiling caught it.
Inside the sealed case,
the dark road remains under varnish.

The current reads it
by passing through.