Blackout Poetry

Yesterday was weird to say the least. I went to the mechanic to pick up my car (which had broken down on the way here and which needed, yet again a new battery and alternator. $300. OK, reasonable). Upon driving it away, it stalled out five times. Needed another "remanufactured" alternator. I had to hitch a ride home. Starving, I went to the dining hall to catch the end of dinner. The dining hall blacked out. As I left, I encountered a squirrel emerging from a garbage can carrying an ice cream cone in his teeth. I went back to the dorm to finish my laundry. I put my wet clothes in the dryer and pushed start. The dorm blacked out. I hung up my soaking clothes all around my room. Charles Simic was scheduled to read in the lecture hall. I was looking forward to it all week. The blackout dominoed all around town, from here to Albany. Campus was dark. We mulled around, waiting. The reading resumed, with the help of lamps. It was hot and smelly. Then the lights went back on. Alix Olin read a short story about a murder. Then Charles Simic was introduced. He walked onto the stage and the lights went out. So he read poems about the dark, in the dark.

Butcher Shop by Charles Simic

Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.

An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.

There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.

There's wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean--a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.