Western Union

Western Union

At a certain level of stress

and constant beleagueredness                

only telegrams arrive from the self.

Just telegrams, which you have never

seen except in movies—not

letters, emails, texts or phone calls.       

It is the form need needs to take

when it is urgent and oracular,

dauntingly declared but not                         

easily or adequately answerable.

Brevity is constricted to a code

and delivery is by a series of discrete

stages, rapid and laborious

as disaster in the Golden Age: 

lips in a lamplit circle 

in an otherwise darkened room

speak haltingly into a mouthpiece,

down a wire to an ear

and fingers striking keys, again

in that aura of soft glow claimed from shadow,

and so on, down more wires, pulses of

meaning pass, changed but preserved,

until they become the slip of dire

handed to you at your own door         

by a uniform without a face.

Standing at the kitchen sink, you read

in your hands under soapy water

what flashed up from your hands in the hall.

Ten typed words ending in STOP.

STOP is what holds you, what you keep

coming back to. The rest

is a cipher whose solution is STOP.

But stop what? Stop this? Stop that?

Stop everything? Answers but not

the answer rise up as the water

turns tepid and the bubbles pop and flatten.

This message, you decide, means mainly

that another message will arrive. STOP,

you recall or contrive, with relief

or the start of dread, comes

in the middle, not at the end.

Soon, you hope. Wish. Fear. Wait,   

since you cannot pray. What

is the point of such a telegram?

you think, then say in an indignant mutter,

trying if confusion and dismay can

grope their way to a hard shoal

of bitterness, someplace to stand.

You know that you are informed

only of certain stark essentials

and by this that you are only a little

informed, and only from great distances.