Kilowatt Hour

I didn’t pin it as grief at first, the feeling
of imagining placing myself
in the path of that truck, but of course
it was grief, grief for myself
in the future—not being around
down the road to feel it, I had to start
feeling it now, I had to make sure

I would not leave the world with my feelings
unfinished, that everything needing
to be sensed would have been
fully sensed, and by me, the way that T
in her old age explained
she always paid off the electric bill
promptly so as to save

her dear ones the trouble of running
around in her absence ascertaining
what was owed and to whom—I could
have responded that zero and zero
only is owed to any extractive
conglomeration, but she had no moment
to hear this, nor to hear

anything—she was too busy
dying, too busy working
to leave the world, the world like a blur
of chassis and axle, the world
like a lace-white twenty-six-foot moving
truck she was dodging, jumping
to safety just in time—