On Your Cell

In my dreams I am dialing your cell
wondering which world you hold
at your ear.
Attentive to a tiny receiver,
you lean on your axis,
a pensive half moon.
Any of the world can come to you now,
yet you believe this might be me--
not any of more loosely compiled:
manic cells in your body
or other terrors
adrift like the dunes
that bury the great Buddhas.

But you are not looking at the gods,
not yet,
you are looking at nothing,
switching your power to your ears.
In my dreams I am clear,
digitally extending,
there and back,
but landlocked just the same,
an Althea listing for you
those things that do not make a prison.

Your son aims to be born in the gap
at the center.
He collects his cells openly.
He both listens and calls you idly
through the palm of my hand
through the connective world curve
that never amazed us properly
until it failed to ring.

Sending. He who imagined
instruments aloft
may have seen himself
cradling one generation,
talking to the next.

Roaming. Reception is poor
in the dust-dark departure tunnels.
We never are safe enough from us,
though the ways we describe the dangers
are ways that we hear in dreams.




Kathryn Rantala