WAITING FOR IRENE

We did a big shop.  We bought burgers + sausages + choc-ices + frozen fruit + had to take everything out of the freezer in order to put it back in differently so it would fit.

Bought a few bottles of wine.

Cleaned the house top to bottom.  Got all the cat hair offa the stairs.

Tidied the yard.  That was overdue like 5 years.  Stowed away all the junk.  Tied up the gates with plastic bags.

Parked the car neatly, along the side of the house.  Along the flank of the house.  Almost tucked under the house.

We filled the tub with water.

Of course we had our emergency kit.  Clio packed a coat given her by her dad's new wife.  I packed the deed to my underwater house.  Insurance documents.  Three big bags of different kinds of chips.    

We had flashlights for our heads.  

We had a peaceful Sunday.  No Internet.  No kids ringing at the door. We ate a lot of meat.  I was relieved at how much ice-cream we could eat.  We lay on the couch and read all day.  The whole day was a hammock from which I watched the light change.

When it got dark everything looked weird.  I looked like a surgeon!  In Russia maybe.  I took creative photographs:

Still Life Of Bath Tub With Cold Water

Green Fall

Dark Street

Our House Without Lights, Exterior

Child Reading With Flashlight On Head And Foamy Comforter

And then the lights came on.

NEUTRALIZER

The poet agreed to kill poetry every single day and did peculiarly well.  Some poets die themselves or go kinda numb after making the neutralizer deal.  This poet thrived.  A hard worker, there was a clause in her contract that she would continue to write.  She promised to extract every flicker of poetry before publication.  Sometimes, life being life and poetry poetry, a ripple, a gust of quickness jumped in.  She recognized it at once, smiled and excised.  If she was feeling down, which happened, she let it be for a while, completing her day’s work and coming back to it later, maybe at dusk, patiently reading before patiently deleting.  It is an adjustment, she thought, like everything.