[Turner Cassity]

Um Português

      (for Paulo)


That phone line is so old I rarely answer.
Retrieving messages is just routine:
my credit score, pitched sales, the march for cancer,
cheap satellite tv—a general theme.
I’ve been away. Press play, m-hmm, delete...
I’m caught off-guard—and smiling, raise my head.
I recognize your accent instantly
and yet it isn’t you. It says: you’re dead.

The winter fog that rolled in from the coast
would swallow up that old stone house, and hold me
for days on end, alone. That haunts me most.
“You’ve such respect for silence—” you once told me,
“—you leave the room, and gently close the door.”
The ghost in my machine says nothing more.



Comments:

I don’t know how else to say this: in this quite good poem there is a better poem trying to get out. Nothing is easier than to revise the life out of a poem, but in this case revising might help, though I would not presume to suggest what revisions to make.