Barter: POEMS

Did You Ever Get a Phone Call

7 DidYou Ever Get a Phone Call Did you ever get a phone call from the past, pleading with you to come back? As in a country song, Pain pulls up its dress, inviting you to look. If it’s not a husband and wife it’s a Serbian hit squad, the front of the bombed-out building so mangled and open, some widow’s cooking in her apartment while next door the bastard’s undressing, we can’t see who it is, lying on the quilt in the bed you made together. You know the voice, the exact pitch and inflection, the flap of it from the window calling out. Is it yours? Can you stare at them like that, at all those who’ve been vanquished, without recourse, the doggedly sad who dream of satin instead of broadcloth? I mean of someone to love them without inventing some self-portrait that looks like a war criminal as he stands over the bodies with his hands behind his back. Right now I’m sending this postcard from a resort town on the Isle of Wight. Right now I’ve got my new wife going down to breakfast, humming. Right now you can see why I turn away from the sink and its rusty drain. But the news is like a warning in reverse, a collapsed barn you remember with the cows still inside, incessantly mooing. Little Sigmund Freud trying to climb back into the womb because he’s sick, there’s no other explanation for that origin climbing, for going back and repainting and replastering as if she were still in bed begging you to bring her a magazine. I prefer the ruins of another country: how quaint they are, where the Romans once built a temple or two. I have friends who say, I can’t forgive the winter. Dear Gods, they say, you wouldn’t pilfer a shadow, would you? ...