I Sang into the Telephone

I Sang into the Telephone

I heard a song this afternoon, as I
meandered in a car not mine along
meandering roads that would soon bring me
back to that place once, and now becoming
again, my home, that brought me quickly back
to Paris, on a morning when we, as
I recall it being said, ‘weren’t
going well,’ and therefore found ourselves in
two different places and apartments,
me on the second phone to be stolen
in my time in that city of skewed mem-
-ories, seated, singing, looking from my
kitchen table facing exactly east
before the building across the way was
being redone, knowing that that was about
the direction I’d have to look to see
you if that distance I could perceive, my
voice transmitting the words of a singer
you knew only by the sounds of him; that
morning I sang, it was a weekend, and
I was alone in my rented space, thus
the seizèd chance to pine loudly
as my cereal sat, getting soggy.

And you, at the end asking, why, why, why
did you feel what you felt, and why, why, why
was there so much meaning in all that had
just happened during the course of this call,
the length of the song, the small number of
weeks of this protean concept of what
it was going to be down the long and
theoretically thorny avenue
of being together, at home, always,
but not quite, ever closer, but not quite.