Power Outage

Power Outage
The heat from this – the hottest day of the year –
Caused the electricity in the entire town to go out,
Presumably from everyone in the area
Turning on their air-conditioners at the same time.
(What good it did them … and the rest of the town)

With not much food in the refrigerator to go bad,
I placed the beer in a large cooler,
Went to the store for a couple bags of ice,
bought another 6-pack in case I run out,
returned home and took the cooler by the pool.

I imagined thousands of people lying on their couches,
Probably with a fan going,
Even more likely with a cell phone in hand,
Calling the electric company complaining of the problem,
And keeping one eye always on the blank clock above the stove.

I sat alone by the pool with a book in complete silence.
The pool’s filter was not running, the hum of the water treatment
Plant made no sound, nor was there a radio,
Loudly playing from neighbor’s yards,
Music I rarely liked to listen to myself.

The only sounds were page flips, and prose bouncing off my brain,
directly into my heart when a stanza rang true.
The birds, too, hiding from the heat in shade, sporadically chirped,
As if they also read a line that touched them so deeply enough
That they wanted to share in my delight.

As sun sank lower behind the trees that line my yard,
the words slowly faded from my sight, and, without
a light to turn on, my reading for the day was done.
How much misery people must be enduring, I thought,
of having to talk and listen without the aid of music or television.

All day long, non-readers were forced to suffer constant conversation.
Hearing stories they wished not to hear,
Telling tales to others, who reciprocated their disinterest.
Silence broke when the hum of electricity elicited a cheer from bored lovers.
It is truly sad how far away we’ve traveled from each other.