or Kaze no Denwa

“The phone doesn’t connect to the dead. It connects to the wind.”
— Itaru Sasaki, in Otsuchi

The river bears its witness under stone.
What gathers there refuses any face.
No psalm will lift it. Weather claims its own,
a pressure time can neither spend nor place.
In Iwate Prefecture, the phone weighs down the air.
You lift it. Something tightens in the wire.
No god steps in. No answer meets you there.
The mouth goes on, exacting its desire.
I call. I do not beg for my release.
I hold the strain where breath and metal bind—
the living hitched to what will never cease,
lover and poet breaking in the mind.
I speak into the form. It does not take.
No voice accepts the offering I make.