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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
DON'T START, by ROBERT FARNSWORTH First Line: Over the phone, through which we struggled Subject(s): Cameras | |||
Over the phone, through which we struggled so clumsily all those many years ago, I try now to describe the process of loading the camera. But I don't have the vocabulary to convey the steps, which aren't difficult, just (for a decade's worth of my having done them by touch) inarticulable. And we almost tumble back into something like those old set-tos, but save ourselves. The boys are asleep in the suite's next room after a long day sightseeing, and neither of us could bear having bickered at such a distance. Yet we used to bear it somehow, didn't we, remember? Now, because I know it's coming, I'm charmed by the rehearsal of your aversion to cameras. You keep fumbling the leader into place across the tiny room behind the shutter, and while I ask if you can feel little cogs through the bordering perforations, I am thinking of our wild sister-in-law, who calls monthly for commiserating sighs to punctuate her circular ventilations of pain, and how you hand me the phone with a good luck look that says you've forgotten those anguished toll-call silences between us twenty years ago. Now I'm judging the progress of the fire I've read beside all evening, and then you divine somehow, perhaps in a faintly anxious mid-sentence quaver, my intention to be off soon, to leave the house for some hours (the theater and a beer) -- you hear my intention to be gone, you hear. And in your voice I hear, with an exquisite quarter-swoop of spirit, I hear your consequent shift in tone, a certain cool flatness there, even as I also hear the camera click shut and the auto-winder whir. But we don't start, as once we might have, no -- I say where I am going, and you where you're off to with the boys and the camera tomorrow, and you yawn good-bye, until Sunday at the airport. For better or for worse (and it's thrilling not to know which), we don't, as once we might have, start. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MY FATHER'S CAMERA by ANDREA HENY STREET by GERARD JOSEPH MALANGA DAUGHTER WITH CAMERA by ELISABETH MURAWSKI |
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