DON’T CALL ME, I’LL CALL YOU—OR NOT

I don’t give good phone.

Phone intimidates me.
Every conversation goes too long,
highlighting how little, even to my friends,
I have to say. Then when I hang up
I always think of what I should have
said but couldn’t think, intimidated as I was;
and because I didn’t say it, my friends might
think that I don’t value them; I want to call them
back straightway, amend the record,
but then they wouldn’t wonder what was
the matter with me, they would know.

Stephen Dobyns once wrote that every poem
at some point comes to be about its own
completion. That concept keeps popping up
in odd contexts, like phone calls,
the instant when you’ve just ticked off
your last agenda item and awkwardness
has kicked in, and all you want is to get off,
but if you’re obvious about it it’s like
saying, “You have nothing to offer me
beyond what I’ve already culled.”

Often the best that I can do is, “Listen,
I’ve got to let you go now,” as though
something was boiling over on the stove,
or the phone police were banging on my door,
bellowing something about a warrant.

I was on the phone once with an aunt of mine,
mother of nine, and I heard a tremendous crash
in the background at her end. She just kept
right on talking till I asked, What was that crash?
She said, “That was just Brendan falling through
the skylight.” Now that woman gave good phone.

It’s not that I don’t like most people—
I like you. I just don’t want to talk to you
on the phone. It isn’t you, it’s me—
no, it isn’t me either, it’s the fact of
the phone. When a phone rings,
there’s something imperious about it,
a command: “Answer me,
answer me,
answer me,
answer me…”
Which used to be
a lot easier to do,
because at least you knew
where the fucking thing was.

I made phone calls for Obama on Election Day.
Hardly anybody answered, and for hours it was
to voice-mails that I read the script they gave me.
If you got one of my messages you’d think,
“This guy gives great message, he’s a natural,
the Second Coming to the phone of James
Earl Jones—” you would be so punk’d!

They had so many volunteers that day
that they ran out of phones. I had more
minutes than I’ll ever need so I went to
my cell, and that afternoon people started
calling me back—who da punk now?

I was away at prep school when
my parents died, six months apart.
The only telephones in the dorm belonged
to faculty. My adviser, gentle Mr. Armstrong,
school librarian, had to hunt me down and in
his bathrobe lead me to the phone in his apartment
up three flights of stairs that still, in my memory,
echo. When I hung up I said, My mother died.
I know, he said. I’m sorry. Later,
My father’s dead. I know. I’m sorry.

When I’m awakened by the phone, can it
possibly be good news? Sweden calling
with my Nobel Prize, unaware of
the time difference? Unlikely. No,
when the phone rings at two AM,
the only question is Who died?
the only answer Someone very dear.
By noon, the odds have shifted
in my favor. So what time does the phone
turn innocent? Where draw the line?
and how? People die all hours. How
convince my heart that now it’s safe?

On the rare occasions I admit
phone-phobia, I sometimes cite those
Mister Armstrong moments, thereby
putting everyone defensive, and maybe
there is some merit to that argument.
But it feels like too easy answer,
handy procedural motion for cloture
before discussion focuses
on something really dangerous.

What that danger is I do not know.

And on the other side (because this poem
is nothing if not Fair and Balanced), we have
the lover who insists I keep my phone turned on,
because there are still, after all this marriage,
times that she just wants to hear my voice.

Because there is always love. The memory of
those sweet, long evenings in the first blush
of infatuation when you have run out—finally—
of all the commonplaces of the day, your secrets—
but not out of energy, this energy is boundless;
and you’ve stubborned through the You-have-to-hang-
up-first-No-you-first impasse, each wanting this to
never-end, just dangle on the line and listen to the
other breathe, knowing if you were together now
there’d be a simple and emphatic way resolve this
welter of tempestuous, exultant ecstasy—and ecstasy
it truly is, your soul really does stand outside your body,
somewhere out in phone-space, meeting your lover
halfway; and the distance, very length of wire or micro-
wave between is rendered an ingenious sexual device
prolonging this, postponing that. I’ve had a few of those—
those conversations, not those devices—and yes,
they do justify the rest. Or almost do.

If I could come to see the phone
as that vehicle of love, then maybe, just
perhaps I could undo incompetence’s knot,
come to a rapprochement, train myself to
keep my phone about my person, tune
myself to turn it on just before she calls
instead of just after; maybe there would be

hope. But I’m too old to change;
and call it what it really is:
the devil’s instrument of my discomfiture.

Listen, I’ve got to let you go now.