Wherever You Are Calling From

Loud in my ear,
the boom of waves against
breakwater,
gusts
that finger
some storm-strung windharp
as you hold your phone’s
receiver
out the hotel window
to share
a gale blowing strong,
late at night,
off the North Sea of Aberdeen.

Wakened, wool-eyed,
from sleep,
I hear your voice: lost
along a highway
flocked
with gorse and furze-backed
mounds of
sheep.
From the refuge of
a phone box, you offer me
the snuffle and bleat of a crowd
of curious ewes.

At week’s end,
just off the River Wye, in Wales,
you stop to use a roadside
phone
to take me on a tour of
Tintern
Abbey: its plane-cut stone
ruins
keep their Great Silence.
Not even
the rustle of a pale
Cisternian robe, ghosting
down
the night-stairs
to prayer.

You will never
call
from wherever it is you
have been taken now.
I press my ear’s pink
shell
to a Conch’s flared lip,
hear a phantom
sea’s empty rise and fall–
the echo of my own blood’s
chambered
slough and sigh.