A poem by Steven Heighton
Elegy as a message left on an answering machine
Hello, you've reached 542-0306. I'm unable to answer the phone just now, but just leave a message after the beep and I'll be sure to return your call Goodbye for now. ______________
Won't bother waiting up for you to get back to me on this one. Waste of time. My dime in a bar by the water, your factory-new
answering machine is—like anything bereaved—still full of your words, the waves of your voice, the nervous laugh that gave us, sometimes, "cause" to laugh. And which we now miss. Well,
human nature. I say Fuck my own. I own up: this stinks. Too late to erase all the crap, a watergate of gossip, off-hand words, no time to phone-
in those last minute changes, additions, to say what we find it so impossible to say— I find. So cut all this can't come to the phone right now cant, I don't
buy it, I figure you're in there somewhere, still screening your calls, you secretive bastard, pick up the phone right now if you would hear a friend. Don't stall,
don't, like me. Thinking there's time, there's still time enough, or rather not thinking enough. Now look, I'm not sure whether the executors will be disconnecting
you—your line — tomorrow (nurses, almost, pulling closed the green curtain and tearing out of your torso the drips and plugs and electrodes to leave you drifting
with that astronaut in the film who squirms awhile, signals some last, frantic word then spins away into the void)— that's why I'm here. Sky's clear tonight, by the way, calm
the wind, the water. Not sure really why I called— gesture of a drunk old friend and ally.
Anyway, it was pretty good for a second or two, to get through, Tom,
goodbye.
Steven Heighton (1961-2022)
Steven Heighton writes: The poem was inspired by the death, in 1993, of my friend Tom Marshall, an older writer who lived a few blocks from me here in Kingston and who had read and critiqued and encouraged me since the mid-eighties, when I started to write poems...The poem is written in slant-rhymed quatrains, generally in a nesting pattern (abba, cddc). But I’ve taken the liberty of varying the pattern when necessary, instead of getting out the shears and the shoehorn. So stanza four (aabb) and stanza seven (cbcb) follow a different scheme. As for metre, I’ve given myself complete freedom, allowing my instincts and emotion to dictate the flow of the line...I wanted to use a somewhat constraining form for this poem as a counterpoise to the strong emotion that fuelled it. Not that the form is meant to deaden the emotion. Just the opposite: it should intensify it by means of compression. In the end—like a bottle of wine left overnight in a car in the dead of winter—the contained liquor of the poem should burst open the container.
More poems by Steven Heighton are available on Canadian Poetry Online.