A Zoom Reading in Which Fanny Howe’s Computer Dies
Church ladies lift their nostrils
to the camera — their noses are like fists. Is that
eighty-year-old eyeroll for the unreality
of a digital room? For no touch in it?
Fanny is walking around
holding her glasses by the temple tips
as her hand runs over her room. In the world
of touch, what whispered thing would have been
whispered at a time like now? What
shifting of chairs, what stuttering door
creaking open? Islanded mute, we are to each other
far away houses. We speak within. We breathe
to no ear. Fanny begins to read, and through
the screen of her screen to mine, she says
she’s wearing the wrong glasses. Oh technology —
just failure made more efficient. We hide our bodies
and they present themselves anyway — like a can tipped,
bag split open to old apples on the sidewalk, and no
raccoon in sight. Then, the chime:
a little ding almost pleasant,
some programmer’s gentle reminder
to connect to power, but Fanny
keeps reading and mid-sentence
disappears as instantly as we entered
her home — no knock, no greeting.
Is this death? But the hands, the mouth,
they were there. If a poem is a score
for a living voice, a song known only to a body,
what disappears the body takes the poem with it.
Sure, we can talk of eternity, of what lives on
past this blinking, this scratching of arms.
But let’s make no mistake — even if no body appears
to listen, there is or was a body leaning across a table
for another word, and another one. Oh
Fanny, don’t go. We’re still with you.