Cave Like Rooms

//cave like rooms

Cave-like Rooms -- Evening

by Liz Southwood 9/5/01


Because of electricity’s
exorbitant cost, we turn
few lights on in our house.
We sit in separate pools of
light, newspapers upon laps,
tennnis on the tube.

We aim a flashlight
when go between rooms at night.
I think “how strange the light must look
to passing cars through the drapes,
as if ghosts are floating about.”

We help each other put sweaters on,
adjusting to the evening’s chill.
Washable linen covers stretch wrinkled
upon our chairs, pale as sun-bleached
summer hills.

Our ancestors lived in caves somewhere
or swung on limbs of trees -- our evenings
are beginning more and more to resemble
those of these, though we eschew
hanging about among rustling leaves.