Untitled ("When they shut of the utitles")

A poem of endurance and inheritance, where utility loss and family voices open into a stark nocturnal resilience.

A poem of endurance that turns a power cut into a private resource: 'When they shut of the utitles / You would be surprised what I / can do with my grandparents / voices'. Stripped to 'shoulders / as bare as twilight', the speaker vows 'I will not be shattered / along my fences', names a beloved as 'a particular part / of a broken Sun', and hums in 'the dead of night', insisting the tune 'ain't dixy, and it is not / the Battle of the Republic'.

The shut-off utilities are met not with panic but with inheritance - what the speaker 'can do with my grandparents / voices' is the real power that stays on when the literal power goes off. The imagery quietly equates the body with dusk: 'shoulders / as bare as twilight', a person dimming with the light yet refusing to 'be shattered / along my fences', holding the property line by sheer will. Calling the man 'a particular part / of a broken Sun' makes him a fragment of a damaged source of warmth, intimacy salvaged from something already broken. The closing humming is defiantly unaligned - neither 'dixy' nor 'the Battle... of the Republic', neither Confederate nor Union anthem - so the speaker's private song refuses both sides of an inherited American argument, sounding only its own ungovernable tune in the dark. The misspelled 'utitles' keeps the bureaucratic word slightly broken, the way the service itself fails.