May 4, 2025Outage
Suddenly we live in a house that doesn’t hum,
on a barren street of dark houses blank and towering,
abandoned bulwarks backlit by the glow
of a city miles away across dark fields.
The walls become thin against the night—
the air within and without, the same temperature.
Drywall divides us from the children of wolves.
When a light goes out, what becomes of the light?
Does it disappear, the way we do?
The well gives no water if the pump can’t run.
The electric fences can’t hold the horses in.
When my father, who lives half an hour away,
hears that our power has gone out,
he tells me again the story of two peregrines
which had been courting in the wind over his roof,
how they landed together on a telephone pole,
sparked an arc and thunder,
and fell to the ground side-by-side, dead.
The house had no electricity for hours after that.
What could bear to keep going, after that?
Our neighbors are slowly vanishing.
An old vessel finally tumbles from its place in the stars.
Tonight, we cancel our plans. We peel oranges
by lantern light. We shine flashlight beams
on the ground before we step there.
We remember the taper candles and matches
that wait in the kitchen drawer that we almost never open.
Listen: the dog barks and barks, inconsolable.
Something unfathomable is happening outside.
What I want is what happened to the peregrines.
Not the singed feathers, the earth-tilting stillness,
but a love that takes the lights out with it when it goes.
The kind of loss that will be recounted over
and over again in the dark.
from Poets Respond