Voices on the Air

From a radio station in Missouri,
an escaped murderer was on the call-in line,
her voice distant, a box within
a box. The talk-show host, imagining the publicity
if he could trace the call, stalled. “Lady,
It’s an F.C.C. thing.” She came back
and recalled Lawton, Oklahoma,
how she killed her husband and two boys, how
a good hunting knife enters the body
clean, as if the body were a pillow.
“But it takes a fat man,” she said, “like
my husband with his fat, hairy belly.”
The host pumped her. Why, why? He wanted
a satan worshipper, an abused wife, or better
a man-hater who revenged her sex upon a husband
and two sons ready to betray her. “No,”
she insisted. “It was the loneliness,
the inequities of despair.”
In the studio, the host nodded
to his technician. “We got her? Good,” he said
on the air. She stayed on the phone, talking,
humming. Humming, I turned off the radio
in my car and looked into the dark
Idaho desert, my eyes reflecting white
on the glass, the lights on a radio tower
signaling red. No outside talk
could come in , except for the ghost
that I would slip into someday,
a rattle in my heart. The world drove on,
inconsolable with hate, murder, and grief:
a man and woman, strangers talking
into a static nothing. Sometimes
the noise at night wakes me. The night before,
it was my neighbor, an eighty-year-old insomniac,
watering her daffodils and morning glories
at three a.m. I turned in bed, alone, the woman
I loved somewhere out a further west, maybe driving
at that moment, hearing the same inexorable
longing I was hearing, the sound of travelers
working their way out of the past. “When we die,”
the murderer said, “we become angels.” I turned,
again, and listened to an aged body
bending to a spigot, releasing a spray of water
on the dark earth, and raising her winged voice
in the night air, singing to the flowers,
electric and needful.

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