Private room, squared to the night world, where
I was buried in the burlesque of a letter
that felt important, like a thin inner cord
being untangled and when finished, would better
my grip on the wherefores and whys. The gas fire
exhaled in blue whispers as if shushing the furniture,
or wowed by the Druidic text of shelved books on crop
failure, maybe, or alchemy, or how young beasts mature.
A quiet so silky, protective as river silt, I felt immersed,
turtled in think-mud as I explained to this friend
how I’d taken to heart what he’d said about preparedness
resembling so closely its opposite that, in the end,
any precaution only comes as a shock. Then, without
warning, the phone wailed — scaring me clear off my seat,
the upswing on my g in “resigned” shot
off, tearing a diagonal ditch through the sheet.
I picked up, screw-eyed in the dark, as if woken
from sleep, as if stunned back to life with a ringing
slap. Nothing. Not even dial tone. Just echoing, hollow
hum from some presence refusing to speak and this bringing
me round to my own presence; the gooseflesh and
fierce need to piss, the pain of my ear folding
back under pressure of silence. I remembered a pact I’d
made as a boy: to answer indifference by withholding
love. You can fuck off, whoever you are … feeling
not just ignored now but watched. It was all too
scripted, staged, like I’d just lived some modern fable
whose moral was the returning of the mouthpiece
to its cradle.