Ring

My fiancée works in Decatur, a town outside Atlanta that's home to Emory University, the Centers for Disease Control, and lots of good food. We've been sampling some mighty fine take-out, usually at night when she gets off work. Idlis and dosas, curried noodles, pulled pork, and a really decent burger from a place called Wahoo! Any place with an exclamation point in its name generally is trouble, I'd say, but this is the exception that proves the rule.

In short, we like it there. In September I read at the Decatur Book Festival and on Monday, December 1st, I'm reading there again. This time it's with Thomas Lux at the Georgia Center for the Book. If you can, you should come out. It'd be great to see you there.

And here's a new poem.

POEM FOR THE TELEPHONE

Because I can’t imagine much more than
a continent’s worth of copper,

strand to strand, pole to pole,
supporting crows in the moment

before their brains spasm with
not thought but imperative

to flight, because I don’t know
why I see when I walk

knotted shoes hung
like dead things from

those suspensions of imagined
copper, because everything

beyond the toaster oven
glows with a magic

in my cloddish head,
I imagine our four a.m.

talk pulsing dark
to dark and back again,

and I am in love
with you, yes,

but also the world in which
love is translated

and carried and kept,
even meted out

in minutes, in cents per each
sweep of the clock

hand, I am
in love with this

world and this word
and the ones after it,

the ones said
in the night

when we are so close
no one could

say who spoke first
and who answered

if we slept,
if we spoke at all.