After

April 17 2011

The phone rings

in the middle of sleep.

A big old-fashioned land-line

bedside,

jangling, masculine, mechanical.

Not that soothing electronic chirp,

or the jazzy tone

you’d have chosen.

On, then off,

a jackhammer shattering the stillness

so even the silence is loud,

the sound, leaking into it

lingering in your ears.

Its measured urgency

is inescapable,

poking you hard, again and again

right between the eyes.

You lie

in your warm moist nest,

on the swampy edge

of wakefulness,

waiting ‘til it stops.

Hoping for a wrong number

an automatic dialler

a time zone gone awry. 

Because bad news comes

in the middle of the night.

When you feel the cold

in bare feet, and thin pyjamas,

and feel suddenly older,

body stiff, brain muddled

mouth thick with sleep.

You reach over

fumble the receiver

hear a tinny voice

calling from the floor.

And through the fog, you realize

that before has crashed to a stop,

and every second of your life

from now on

is after.

I indulged a bit in this poem. First of all, I went with a lot of detail:  so maybe failed to trust the reader enough, spoon-fed her a bit too much. This is something I often find I have to resist, strenuously reminding myself that I’m writing a poem, not a novel! And second, I succumbed to “suddenly.”   I say “succumbed” because I generally dislike adverbs, and this one in particular. Because the writing should be strong enough that whatever the adverb would have done is implied:  in other words, the crucial  the idea of “showing it”, now “saying it”. It’s that adverbs tend to patronize the reader:  hitting her over the head, doing too much of the work for her; which takes a lot of the pleasure out of poetry, where the reading and re-imagining can be as much a creative act as the writing was.

But sometimes, precision takes precedence over compression. There is pleasure in both approaches to writing.

This poem is all about those critical “hinge” events that bifurcate life, events that create a distinct “before” (usually naïve, and bathed in rose-coloured nostalgia) and “after” (the new harsh reality.)  And why does bad news inevitably come in the middle of the night anyway?!!