Gail Mazur Phonic
As if my answering machine were a rejection, you'd leave your forlorn message: Call your father. . . . Then, a dial tone. Guilty of being out, or busy, I never thought to save the tape, to keep some resonance and pitch of you, if only in those four syllables— tremulous, demanding, but tangible as the snapshot I found today, a torn dwarf, her plump gray face shadowing as she squatted on our front porch, tight braids, strange frown, white Mary Janes.
I'd forgotten that silent child until I held her flattened image; My peopled past is curled and tattered, tucked into envelopes and albums; it reconstitutes itself in dreams, a richesse of repeat performances— a friend's touch become sweetly erotic, my children, peachy and clinging again, you, saying you're not afraid of dying. . . . I wish I could listen to your voice instead of the staticky measures of a cassette's repetitive erasures.
Although sometimes in my edgy sleep, I hear a Gail! that snaps me awake,
Most Recent Book: The Pose of Happiness (David R. Godine, Publisher, 1986) 248 GAIL MAZUR
an urgent extrasensory appeal
I take for mortal emergency.
I feel sure it's you, calling for something I don't understand and never did. Then, it disappears.
The voice is nowhere in my wakefulness, not kept in memory's burr— no tender disinterested utterance you never quite pulled off in life, good as you were.
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