Phone in a White Room
A single phone,
only thing in a white room.
Mounted on the
wall to my right.
Light pours
through the windows, pockets
of glare,
trellis of shadows, walls of stone.
This is a place
of emptiness,
like the place
inside me
that waits for
the phone to ring,
doesn’t want it
to ring because it might
be the news I
dread—someone I love
not coming
home—the hospital or the cops—
that someone
sick or in trouble.
The room twists,
like Rubic’s Cube.
Now the phone’s
on the floor as if
everyone’s moved
out or no one’s moved in.
An albino of a
room.
White as the
whale, more terrifying than black.
This is the
color of absence.
The room shifts
and turns,
a clock that
ticks and moves its arms.
The phone’s on
the opposite wall,
upside down,
cord going the wrong direction,
laws of gravity
defied.
Light lifts from
the floor, crisscross
of shadows like
cells in a prison or a lunatic asylum.
Someone turns my
world upside down.
The phone’s on
the ceiling, cord dangling
like Tantalus’
grapes, and if it rings,
I can’t answer.
I’m here on the floor, calculating
the shortest
distance between two points.
This is the
geometry of longing. The circle broken.
It’s all perspective,
depth, shadows,
and how the
light plays out.
It’s down to the
phone that rings, or doesn’t.
So much empty
space, all squares and rectangles,
so many straight lines, all hitting hard walls.
Bio: Diane Lockward’s second collection, What Feeds Us (Wind Publications), received the 2006 Quentin R.
Howard Poetry Prize. She is also the
author of Eve's Red Dress (Wind 2003)
and Against Perfection, a
chapbook. A third full-length
collection, Temptation by Water, is forthcoming from Wind summer 2010. Her
poems appear in Garrison Keillor's Good
Poems for Hard Times and in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her poems
have also been featured on Poetry Daily,
Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. A former high school English teacher, Diane
now works as a poet-in-the-schools.