Power Outage

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2003 by Thiel, Diane

Some might have called it the reckless immortality

of youth, the way I charged through days and wired nights,

ready to take or leave anything with no notice.

Driving drunk through life, even more willing to let

drunks drive me home-drawing stalkers like a siren.

(The night the power went out, I had heard from one by phone.)

Housesitting for an anthropologist, her home filled

with masks, effigies, bones, bound to give anyone nightmares.

African spears, with patina proving they had been used,

positioned, oddly, in the corner of the bedroom.

A cough in the middle of the night-that noise of things shutting off.

I was suddenly awake. Felt for the phone. Cordless. Dead.

Naked, I leapt out of bed, feeling along the wall for the spears.

The weapon first. Crouching close to the door, my ears

pricked. Every tree brushing the unfamiliar house,

every wooden creak-a footstep. It was that night,

naked in the dark, a spear in my grip-I was ready to live.