Dumb Phone

For the year I’ve been back

It has sat alone at the fireplace

Early noughties, flip screen, numbers reading ABC.

You want to recycle it - lithium etc.

But worry resumes its tapestry, mineral coloured,

A life’s work, telling of events to come:

Your Impressionist notions of SIM fraud

A few dozen SMS characters, lit up again

Unfamiliar thumbs on pixels of her.

And it clothes the day

Lost keys, internet banking, driving in the dark

Because at dusk it gapes

Lacing up everything that could be in night.

I have paused, breath mint-burnt,

Thought to nudge your night-lit door ajar

To see a river violent with surge

And silent

Between artex ceiling whirls,

Your feet cast blue in the room you shared.

Another morning

I’m attending to the voices

Streaming faceless over ocean and moor.

Busy with modern work and the worry

That it will never mean anything.

Outside there’s the softest crack

Muffled by hands cupped

As if to reset a fine bone

Or tenderly wring a neck.

Outside the light of a second year back

Shines off its silvery innards

Where it lies, shucked by the bin.

Your appeal to the water

To carry what’s soluble away.