Sometimes I live in a highland valley
in a town so tiny the power goes out
at the first strike of lightning
I was watching videos
of Japanese people cooking tiny things
and American teens pressing sequins into slime
and looked up just as the first violet vein
shot into the loose and easeful shoulder
of Mount Greylock
reclined like a big soft swimmer
on the peak of her own splashings
I mean of course there are generators here
it is a hamlet of tiny dieties
the town isn’t completely black
I know this from my nest in the air
windows that look West over the Taconics
South over the stream and the fields
and East to Greylock
who Melville called
y’all
Charlemagne
among his peers
The rain is starting and stopping
it’s better when it’s on
the whole ordeal more purposeful
I stalk the empty hall
shut all the machines
fiddle with fusebox
The flashes are so bright and so long
it just looks like day
on a stormy afternoon
the young leaves flip neon
their first real night thrill
Kids scream in the rain
car alarms
distant siren
churchbells still
doing the hours
The peepers start
about an hour in
and the raat ki raani is in heavy bloom
intoxicating like they say—
wet and stretchy
like American teenage slime
like being bedded in the
malai on a Karachi afternoon
My boyfriend is at a party
and this I think is ideal
I go in exactitude
without my flashlight
for the stepladder
for the high cupboard where
the emergency candles are
There’s still thunder
There’s no more rain
cars arc their headlights
across the low upper floor ceiling
When the rain starts again
it wants to be heard alone
A drop seeks out my neck
and rolls
because the jasmine was so heavy
I had to open a window
even though it could easily
ruin everything
ruin the padded
silence of blackout night
blackout nest in the upland valley
blackout town so tiny it goes dark
at the first strike of lightning
I mean
I’m not a monster
I’m checking my Instagram
and contemplating going to the party
In the blackout of 2004
I walked my elderly boss down
eighteen flights of stairs by lighter
she kept pet doves that looked exactly like her
and we ate all the cheese in her fridge
on crackers stamped with Einstein’s face
Germans have a word for the mountain
closest to your home
of course
In May the rivers charge down the slopes
and just past mud season
you discover
a new canal-side path
full of what will be raspberries
while the barn swallows do
the dance of all the cosmos
over the reservoir
The old building breathes
its cellular sighs
while the bats craze
out and over the houses below
I know my friends with children
envy me this time
The mountain
her temperamental constancy
season holder
May carving down her shoulders
how she will die some day
I’m free to think about
things like love
to hear the fast spring stream prancing
on her own grave and think
in Flint they have no
running water
and I’m a teacher who doesn’t teach there
If there’s such a thing as spells or curses
they break the instant the fan
comes back on
its buzzy breeze the sound of
real night moving off
That lightning wrote itself on my eye
cracking the passive gradient of rust (top)
to seafoam (bottom)
One bold a crescent on her side
waiting to cradle the star beyond this cloud
and all that is dark
in natural history
pours out of me
to meet it there
