The Phoneless
Washington D.C., June 1991
Coming out of the subway, we saw them:
Different, and their lap-tops no longer
Held like the bows of front-desk violins
Poised to perform the opening of the Ring,
But attached to them as a beggar is
To his rattling Coke can. As if they had
For hours been lost amid the hiss and coil
Of an unspooling world serpent, restrained
Until now by sheer weight of endlessly
Linked voices, voices. Or they were escaping
Some terrible regression, up silver scales
And into the black of day.
Yesterday,
All the phones in three states failed.
Computers
Designed to cushion consumers against
This sort of thing, to by-pass overloads,
Overloaded, their rabid blathering spread
To systems in the neighbourhood, and soon
Silence was falling on D.C., Maryland,
Virginia, West Virginia, the maiden
Purity of peace: only that buzz-buzz
Cicada in the gingkos, where the wires
Futilely loop between telegraph poles --
Petrified tree-trunks on display outside
The Museum of Natural History.
Page(s) 45-46
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