Strong winds passed through and the power was out for hours. Today I have food to throw out.
There’s a type of anxiety that happens when storms hit. Once the power was out, I became aware of all the things I wanted to do that required power. Sure, it’s been days/weeks since I’ve submitted poems for publication, but with the power out, I wanted to submit everywhere and couldn’t… or something like that. With the power out, I tried to conserve my phone battery, but also kept checking my phone because it was my only connection to the outside world. 56%, 45%, 31%, 22%, low battery mode. Plug it into the compute which will also run out of battery.
Earlier in the day, when the weather was nice and the sun was shining, I walked into town with the intention of buying some poetry books, buying a new notebook, and sitting at an outside coffee shop or bar and writing longhand. I had decided my practice for poetry month would be to write something (hopefully a poem) longhand every day.
One of my complaints about downtown state college is the lack of outdoor dining. I get it, the weather here is miserable for six or seven month of the year. Nevertheless, when the weather is nice, the options are limited. There’s a pub that I sometimes go to, but they only have pizza and it doesn’t look very good. There’s a coffee shop that I like, but they don’t really have food food. I wanted lunch and beverages and sunshine. Seeing as I couldn’t get them all at the same spot, I went to an indoor bar for lunch and a beer. The beer was good, the lunch wasn’t. Still wanting to sit outside and write, I went looking for my next spot. The coffee shop tables were sunny, but full. The bar with the outside space and not good looking pizza had a line of 15 or 20 college students waiting to get in. I gave up and walked home.
By 3pm the winds were whipping. I took the dog to a park. Within minutes, branches were starting to fall. When we got back to the house, the power was out. I paced around anxiously. I walked around the outside of the house and up the lane looking for downed wires – none. The power company’s phone line was busy. I pulled up an online outage map that said over 1,500 customers affected. Power would be restored by 6 pm. What would I eat? Almost everything I have requires cooking. I could walk to the bar nearby, but what if they don’t have power? As six o’clock approached, I ate some fruit and some bread with peanut butter. The clouds and the rain made it darker than it would normally be. I tried to write a poem about loss of power in which I juxtaposed an actual power outage with a conversation in which a distant friend’s wife was leaving him and taking the kids and the house and his retirement. Two versions of losing power. The writing wasn’t very good, but day one of longhand writing was in the books – literally.
As dusk fell, I poured a glass of wine, lit a candle, and read by the light of a flashlight. Most of the neighbors had power – it looked like it was just our street that was out. That made me feel isolated. I figured I was going to die in this house. The dog would have to gnaw on my bones for sustenance. The power company had updated their outage map. Power should be restored by 8 pm. At around 9 pm, I called it in again – they no longer gave a time for when power would be back. I woke up when the electricity came on. It was a little after midnight. I turned the heat on (because it was 63 degrees in the house and going into the 20s outside) and went back to sleep.
This morning, the sun is trying to break through the clouds and the wind has died down (a little). I read two poems that might be considered love poems. The one poem by Rainer Maria Rilke reads:
Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape
and the little churchyard with its lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.
The other poem, “The Morning After” by Ellen Bass depicts the domestic normalcy that we slip back into even after a night of passion. It begins:
You stand at the counter, pouring boiling water
over the French roast, oily perfume rising in smoke.
And when I enter, you don’t look up.
You’re hurrying to pack your lunch, snapping
the lids on little plastic boxes while you call your mother
to tell her you’ll take her to the doctor.
I can’t see a trace of the little slice of heaven
we slipped into last night—a silk kimono…
Both poems seem appropriate for the morning after a storm and a power outage – a morning in which the sky is clearing and normalcy has returned. It’s cliched, but true: wait long enough and the storms will pass. Things will look different in the morning. Sometimes there’s cleaning up to do.