Fanny Howe

[the final section of "Forty Days" from Fanny Howe's The Lyrics, 2007]

29.

Call out.
Press nine.

I will hear some shift of gray in the air.
Will ingest the frost of its silence.

A six-foot bed
And a sprawler's sigh through the wall

Of this fifty-pound hotel
Occupied by the dropped.



Call out, no call back.

Fall fast forward without will
To the window.

The other world is pressed
Against the glass:

A kind of heaven, a known nothing.

Call out to the cone-opening light
To colors never seen before

But most familiar.



Call out of the grit in your tissue
Before your days are written

Or you will be too late for the answer.

Be really primitive.
A thin finger picture

Of nature undernurtured.

Like egg, parchment, glue and the breath of the artist.



Call come in at last
Immaterial

When or where
A message from that.

I will be packed into people
Against a strange tin.

Vehicles will glitter
And polyphony the interrupter

Will cut every sentence in half.

Call I won't call back.
Call up into the night.

"Knower, how is this voice different from the others?"

The Lyrics: Poems