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.

Pamela Gross is a poet from Seattle. Her first full-length collection, Birds of the Night Sky/Stars of the Field, was published by the University of Georgia Press as part of its Contemporary Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest and Commonweal, among other journals.