A Night Between the Lakes

Outage,

Frustrating 

I’m already at some psychic 

Limit

Leave me

Alone 

Then, all right? Now

Night dark beautiful

No power on our rural road

No power we can see

And isn’t that a stunning word

To employ, power, when I 

Wish for leveling, for balance? 

Realities collide

What I wish, what is,

Shows essence in the midst

Of frustration, and

Meanwhile the utility trucks prowl our

Road, reassuring somehow, 

Simply just their prosaic quest 

How pure and beautiful this dark

Forcing contemplation

Forcing surrender

Only a few moments really, these eleven hours, 

Perhaps more, but never mind, 

In the greater scheme I’ll never know, I 

Shall humble into dark, join 

Myself into

One bolt of nothingness 

And everything

When the children were little 

We walked the night

Listening to the indigenous 

Creatures of that dark cover, 

Mindful of meadow and pond,

We learned to suspend insistence

And give in to 

The vision of the moment’s night. 

Never could I have imagined 

That lesson coming home

In my fulsome fury about

A simple power outage

But here we are, and it is so 

And I overwhelm myself with
The deep lightlessness of 

Grateful. 

My mind stirs,

Straying into the brackets 

Of my life.

Earlier I fought to photograph 

This storm, its changing light, but 

Could not get it right 

When all I needed to do

Was feel the winds change 

Trust the corridors of derecho 

And gale, and let words find
My elemental learning

Tonight I understand 

From the young guys in the trucks 

That everything went out and down

Over on Seneca in this day’s late
Afternoon,
And so here

Atop the pause 

Descending from the Hector Backbone
Down toward Cayuga 

The world just had to stop.

The power’s come back on now.