Sunday Poem – Tom Weir

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…