You Hate The Telephone

You hate the telephone but will not see me face to face so I am left beseeching you long-distance, trying to thread our love along the telephone poles of Vermont, trying to tunnel it under the Atlantic as if it were a rare fossil I'd unearthed, or an offshore pipe bearing precious oil. But it is your face I love, your funny grin that now seems cruel around the edges. You do not wish to be cruel-you, the kindest person in the world, but driven to curious rages when you feel pressured, frustrated, saddled with an albatross of love like an ancient mariner who tells his same sad story to the wedding guests. The telephone will not suffice. Coleridge would have loathed it, & so would his mariner. It is our modern Person from Porlock, interrupting poems, interrupting loves & forever keeping us at arm's length. I would look you in the eye again, saying yes, yes, yes- we have said no enough, for the rest of many lifetimes.