Each morning before dawn
I’m on the wireless with inaudible murmurs
in-calling OLD MAN TO YOUNG LADY
in dots dashed tapped out
in railroad code – dah-di-dah-dah –
in blinking torture – dah-di-dah-di-dah –
in click and sigh and real catastrophe.
Calling you: THIS IS MY LAST CRY
BEFORE ETERNAL SILENCE.
For no high-keyed reply. For no remorse.
Three dots, three dashes, then three dots.
The stylus is caught up static, unimpressed.
So then, consign it, call it, sign it off with:
just a single strike, a dit, a signature dot.
Late morning, I’m licking stamps,
writing wish-you-were-here postcards,
and spelling out my signature address,
half enjoying my responsibilities.
I feel the pulled mute compulsion
of the tin-can telephone, of carriage bolts,
of teapot handles, and bustle wire.
Voice-like sounds trail in my wake
in tailed induction coil and liquid transmit
– epigraphs, epitaphs, blank embezzlings –
catching in the crosstalk and the hum,
as our parted pairing twines out across
an unbridgeable input-output chasm.
All these discontinuous waves:
all the engines of my ingenuity
can’t help us now. By midday
I’m sounding hollow notes in bottles
and if I soon succeed I’ll bask in glory,
shouting, ‘Come here, all England confides!’
Calling, come here, unexpectant: I need you.
By evening, I’m posting pigeons
– my cher ami shot down in friendly fire:
your barrage is right on top of me!
please for heaven’s sake stop it! –
I’m sending smoke alarms and semaphore
all one armed up and out. Help.
Romeo in approach at dip. Romeo close-up.
Juliet: I’m on fire with dangerous material;
keep well clear of me, my dear.
Uniform: I’m running into danger.
Delta: manoeuvring with difficulty.
Foxtrot: I’m disabled. Lima: quarantine me.
Victor, I need you. Kilo, I do. Zulu,
send your tugs. November in November.
At sunset, crack out red fusees
projectile flared pyrotechnic distress
in strontium nitrate sky lettering
in potassium nitrate picture postcards
I signal-bomb you up and over Yangzhou:
sawdust charcoal sulphur scrawling
And luminous calcium charges, depth-dropped,
catch pearls that were. Late at night: séances.
The Baron George and First Lady Lincoln
lay down their sly and shaky hands, but all we get
are Black Hawk, Pericles, Plato, Peter the Great,
just savages amassed in the medium. Not you.
Just dust and ashes on the spirit slate. Not you.
This correspondence, written at the moment
of our crash, goes unanswered quite.
Franz wrong. F wrong. Thine wrong.
They are for you, take them, take them again;
they kiss upon the wide hand in its delicate glove.
(She has made you write to yourself; she has made you
write; she made you; she has you; she has; you write.)
Not a word for a week. It really is dreadful.
I did get a telegram. But it wasn’t meant
for me (my wise old woodland uncle wasn’t ‘of Milan’).
Then, at last: ‘We are sitting in the restaurant
at the zoo, after spending the afternoon sitting
in the zoo.’ These are dreadful, wasted ecstasies,
failures to depart, lacking succession unsuspended.
Wrong! Wrong! Ghosts like ping-pong balls
move on between lines – perfidy! perjury! –
and written kisses won’t reach their destination.
And neither (so, I know it now) does cross-eyed jealousy:
I best stop asking, ‘Who is Herr Hartstein?
Who in hell he?’ It is late. It is time. Stop, hap,
and so, and there, ’tween my water-marked sheets
– tucked corners, crisp folds, mummy’s linen –
I now discover the discrepancies, now the inky slips,
your monkey’s inky pawprint, your misprints,
new mistranslations, mistranscriptions, variants,
sleight Egyptian encryptions. Each amazing errancy.
This is not my book: not one – and now it dawns –
of those from the ships.