Each time I’m in her country, my translator
lends me the phone of her dead husband.
The smooth black slab’s like a miniature gravestone.
It doesn’t have dates of his birth or death,
but connected by umbilical cord to a power source,
it comes to life with messages for the dead:
Jim, your friend commented. Jim, get updates.
Not only the phone is on a first-name basis with him.
When my translator calls to ask me about some word
in a poem, and I don’t pick up, the phone
responds with his voice. ‘I didn’t say anything,’
she tells me later. ‘A year on, it’s like he’s still here.’
As if he were here and could click on push alerts
from CNN: the price of gas, immigration, the blizzard,
taxes. Instead, I’m the one who clicks. I add my accounts
and contacts to his contacts and accounts,
the pictures I take go into his album.
At first, they huddle at the edge like shy guests,
but over time, they push their way in
and are surprised when a selfie of their host
appears like a ghost behind them.
Jim was a poet. Now his cell phone,
leading me through new terrain where it’s my only
map, slowly becomes a poem. There’s so much more
of me in it, so I keep delaying the end.
I take it on a transatlantic flight to a country
he never visited – just a couple of lines yet,
now one more, before I hand it over to my translator.

Image © Simon Lee