The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poem Thread, 8/21/07

"A Phone Call To The Future"

1

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black and white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.

Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you're not there.
You'll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there's only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family's having dinner.

Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That's how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.

The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onionskin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who make their dresses for the dance.

2

This was the Fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That's why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more—this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.

The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there's touch tone.
But wait, the killer's waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the big computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter’s running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.

They're Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phone shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.

3

It's the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone's stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it's a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,

you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.

Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It’s less than that, not anymore a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.

Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental—
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the Fifties.

That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity,
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

—Mary Jo Salter

I know it couldn't have been about the big words, because this poem doesn't have that many of them.

hoping that this poem would expand Lounger's minds a little. It completely warped me (seriously) after I first read it. "Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera." ACK!

I find the fact that they get recommendations so very, very amusing. It's also interesting for me to see which ones get more recs than others. Sometimes, I really cannot tell which poems Loungers are going to respond to and which they aren't.

I think this poem will have an entirely different impact in 20 years because it will give 2 flavors of archaic, instead of just a contract between old and modern. :)

in twenty years.

I know a lot of progressives, especially those mature enough to remember when people took the ever-present thread of nuclear annihilation seriously, claim they think about what the world will be like in five years, or ten, or more, but this poem put my brain in a place it hadn't been for a while about that subject. Like, seeing the world in twenty years as a big, flaming rock with basically no people on it, no plants, or animals, just dust, and maybe a dream recorder, somehow still operating, playing back some long-dead person's dream to an audience of echoes.

what the future will be like, but not whether or not it will be here. I think humanity will survive, but I'm pessimistic about what conditions will be like.

I think we will hit a tipping point and we are going to see a planet-wide degradation of the quality and quantity of life. Technology will still advance, and some of it will be beyond what we can easily imagine today. But it will be miraculous technology in a degraded world.

I think that's the perspective we'll be looking back from. The past will look both primative and ideal.

to make the past she describes in the poem seem both primitive and ideal.

:hi: i love a good poem in the morning with my coffee :donut:

As I posted above, I was hoping this one would expand readers' horizons. It's wiggy.

it makes perfect sense to me :shrug:

me----------> :crazy:

between the human and the non-human."

:silly:

:rofl:

:hide:

:yoiks: