The line hisses

Mournfully

Can static impart feeling?

Words mangled in distance

Years of it, leaving fugitive ache

Bottomless sea from which no swimmer could surface

Loneliness can feel like drowning on land

A strange grasping sensation, a preview of dying.

The line hisses

I imagine you trying to get through

Narrowing your shoulders, hips, skull, ventricle

Climbing in time, in timber, in foil and galvanic gurgle

What’s that? Inconscient conversation mailed abroad

Mumbled, incoherent, chaotic, chopped into stucco

When you played the piano, your graceful hands lifted like marching animals

We would sing our bleeding hearts out with the lusty joy of the condemned

Your wrists flicking in harmony, precision, sonar

I will never return home, the portal is welded closed

You have replaced the piano cover, pushed in the bench, dusting surface

With acoustic certitude.

The line hisses

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Do you hear? Through the ocean, satellites orbiting

Roving waves, decades, birth, death, moments

Carved within me like totems

What would you say? Speaking underwater

I listen until my ears hurt, filled with pressure

Nothing decipherable, lost thread, electric eels

Charging the oceans with augured light.