There are gestures that have been lost.
One was picking up a desk phone
Using a couple of fingers
To snag it under the little shelf where the receiver
Rested when it was not in use;
You’d carry the phone with you if you needed to pace,
Perhaps with a studied restlessness that felt good:
You were removing a solid object from its position
And that had meaning. You gestured with it in hand,
Or held it against your hip. Something both possessive and devil-may-care in it.

The disruption of a ring, the caller unknown,
Was one of the day’s small dramas. We lived for them.
There were hours unaccounted for, pages turned.
Ticking of the heart between rings . . .

A feminine variant was to wear the curling receiver cord
Sashed across your waist, over the elbow, up the arm
So the curls were stretched long, the receiver
Tight-tucked in the neck hollow and pinned to its job—
To speak and to hear, companion of both mouth and ear.
Maybe standing while talking, at a window.
A light pleasure in the binding, an intimacy
With the subject or the person listening
That he couldn’t see.

And the pauses when neither of you spoke
Were alive, space-filling, somehow physical.

You could hear rooms.
Conversations were rooted in them.
They didn’t move around.
You knew there was life in another house—doors slammed,
Supper bells, doorbells, messages scratched on pads, handwriting that told,
People who left rooms and never came back.
People who might surprise you, come from so far there was no phoning them.

I don’t mean that life was better then,
But our conversations were theatre.
Farewell, until
You didn’t know when.