Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling

Radio

Radio They enter by one earphone and leave by the other: ghost narrations. The sound of rats or someone trying the doorknob (I don’t mean the cop on the beat) static like the table-talk of parrots or scarlet monkeys screeching in trees until a voice, maybe human, speaks but hesitates, caught for an instant before being sucked into the blackness like a book thrown from the window of a train (the pages beat as quickly as the wings of a bird that senses some danger unheard on radio then dies). This is what we use now in lieu of maps. What comes to us is where we go. Much depends on conditions. Jailer, I insist on an omen to subdue my doubts or, failing that, a radio. I hear too many nasal accents, see too many vacancies and embalmed businesses and railyards where the only sound of life is freight trains having rusty sex, yawning and stretching in the distance, running headlong at each other like whales (they covet our stability, we envy them their freedom). Up all night with the fear of death and the radio, listening in the dark with middle-aged wonder 14 / Plans Deranged by Time reminded of the old unbearable melancholy made worse when there was nobody to share it (or confide it to). My dead friends why can’t I find you on the radio? The Poetry of George Fetherling / 15 ...