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Robert Lunday
Telephone Ode


Praise to the old phones in their heavy black formal wear, their Bakelite or nickel skins;

two-fisted candlestick phones, wall phones with twin bells like warrior-woman breast cups –

their many-eyed dials, hooking the numbers in sweeps: static, wrong numbers, busy signals, phones off their hooks and the ringing without end;

phone booths, space capsules on night-corners; the roomy British booths, wood-paneled train-station booths for last goodbyes;

the angelic operator, Mademoiselle O – so curt and businesslike, yet at times so kind; her lovely unseen face, her syllables of eyes;

old phones with heft! – we did not carry them, but went to them; made furniture for them and placed them in nooks as for idols and icons;

old phone, homunculus, casket or samurai head, your gnomic squat; enormous cartoon phone leaping and shaking with business and passion!

(You, on the other end: I wanted never to leave messages, but only to reach you.)

Robert Lunday is the author of Mad Flights (Ashland Poetry Press). Recent work appears in The Yoke, Black Sun Lit, Poet Lore, Field, Poetry Daily, and Beloit Poetry Journal. He teaches at Houston Community College and lives on a small horse farm in central Texas with his wife, Yukiko.

www.theyokejournal.com/index.php/issues/six/lunday pankmagazine.com/piece/robert-lunday/ www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/online/2009/lunday.html www.versedaily.org/2013/fail.shtml www.wordriot.org/archives/6491