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The Answering Machine

By Linda Pastan b. 1932 Linda Pastan

I call and hear your voice

on the answering machine

weeks after your death,

a fledgling ghost still longing

for human messages.

Shall I leave one, telling

how the fabric of our lives

has been ripped before

but that this sudden tear will not

be mended soon or easily?

In your emptying house, others

roll up rugs, pack books,

drink coffee at your antique table,

and listen to messages left

on a machine haunted

by the timbre of your voice,

more palpable than photographs

or fingerprints. On this first day

of this first fall without you,

ashamed and resisting

but compelled, I dial again

the number I know by heart,

thankful in a diminished world

for the accidental mercy of machines,

then listen and hang up.

Source: Poetry (August 2000).

Biography

Poet Linda Pastan was raised in New York City but has lived for most of her life in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In her senior year at Radcliffe College, Pastan won the Mademoiselle poetry prize (Sylvia Plath was the runner-up). Immediately following graduation, however, she decided to give up writing poetry in order to concentrate on raising her family. After ten years at home, her husband urged her to . . .

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