Talking to You in Hanoi – Tom Weir
Talking to you isn’t talking to you, it’s talking to myself;
my voice, not yours, on the other end of the line.
The half-second delay between here and Hanoi
feels like a lifetime, interrupts everything I say.
The sound of you crying doesn’t break, is constant,
but every word I speak, every awkward stutter,
finds its way back to me, the way a cat returns
to an old house; the mouth piece throwing back
the disembodied echo of every word I speak.
My voice hasn’t been revealed to me this way
since the first time I heard it played back
as a child. Is this the voice you always hear,
how I sounded the first time we spoke,
god, the first time we made love?
When you do say something it catches me by surprise.
I don’t hear you at first, forget…
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