The Signal
Stephen Anderson
A five hour road trip and three hours of moving my daughter
back into her dormitory have left me hot and tired, a refugee in
a downtown Minneapolis hotel. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to call
an elderly aunt whom I have seen a total of four times over the last
quarter century. When she answers, her reedy voice quavers with
a peculiar tone of strident urgency, and she asks … no, she insists
that we drive out to visit her and my uncle at their west-side
suburb, really the last thing on my mind this humid, smoldering
late-summer afternoon with threatening-looking rain-clouds already
thundering across the plains off to the west. So I regrettably decline
her frantic request and tell her that such a trip would be nigh on
impossible, which is something that my aunt does not want to hear
because she obsessively repeats her wish with her former urgency
now turned to a tone of sheer desperation. A captive of exhaustion,
I do not take the hint, nor can I hear her real message, the one
vibrating up from her heart like a call from the other world
to which only she knows she will soon go.
[This poem was first published in the 2008 Wisconsin Poets' Calendar]
Stephen Anderson was the First Place winner of the Kay Saunders
Memorial New Poet Award in the 2005 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Triad
Contest. His work has appeared most recently in Free Verse, Backstreet
Poets’ Quarterly, Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar (2002 &2008), Southwest
Review, Fox Cry Review, among other publications. His chapbook, The
Silent Tango of Dreams was published by Pudding House Publications
in 2006. He lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin.