The Lattice in the Rye

A new high-voltage line crossing flat farmland in Brandenburg on a windy April noon, in the foreground a slender steel lattice mast painted grey-green on a concrete footing, at its top two crossarms projecting to one side and a curved peak bracket, from the crossarms long strings of porcelain bell insulators, stranded copper conductors gleaming as they curve away to a row of masts across the fields, young green rye, cloud shadows on the land, on the horizon the smoking chimneys of a brown coal works, a lineman in a dark jacket seen from directly behind at the mast foot, face turned fully away, his hand on an angle iron.