The phone, a black slab,
a dormant beetle, lies face down.
Not ringing.
Not his number, a ghost-echo from the 417,
the voicemails I can’t erase,
like frost-flowers breathed on glass.

He’d call, a rumble in the static,
a long highway road leading to his recliner,
a slow drawl about the cardinals at the feeder,
the ice cream melting down the cone.
He’d tell me that joke again,
“Have you heard about the husband whose wife died in Israel?”

I’d heard it before, but I’d welcome it again,
He would pray with me, emotions over the line
passion and a need for salvation.
He knew, of course,
knew the shared grief of the earth,
the way the light thins,
the way the old dog sleeps deeper.

Now, the silence is a thicket,
a bramble where his voice should be,
a phantom limb of the receiver.
I reach for it,
the way a blind man reaches for a familiar door,
only to find a wall,
cold and unyielding.

No more stories of the ARC
and of Salvation Army Officership
although it’s all still coursing in our veins
– this passion to serve and love…
No more humorous bantering about the Cubbies, or the Chiefs or
those cheese heads up there in Green Bay.
His knit-yellow and green stocking cap
worn proudly on his head…

The phone, a black stone,
a monument to the void,
a reflection of the temporary
And I?
a little bit less than I was before those old tired jokes,
there is a loss I cannot put to words
a lost connection,
no more calls from 417
but this too is temporary.
It’s a silence that stretches, for a time
a continent of grief but not the whole of it,
Something else, more constant
and everlasting is just on the horizon

But perhaps just tonight
I’m getting ‘mad’
and my kids will be happy
and we’ll think of him.
Thanks, Grandpa, GrandStan
Pawpaw…so many other names
these terms of endearment.

I’ll see you again
and we can get mad
all over again,
and you can regale me with
One more awful joke
that you’ve told me before.