Elegy for the Answering Machine

We kept the tape because it kept her voice —four seconds of it, saying we weren't home,please leave a message after the small tone,and thank you, in the voice she used for strangers.

Not even her real voice. The company one.The one she'd put on like a better coat.And yet when the machine wore out, and the manat the shop said he could not save the tape,

I understood that she would die again,smaller this time, the size of four short seconds,the size of please, the size of after the tone —and that I would not be there, and could not stop it,

and that some griefs are just the earlier griefarriving late, in a cheaper, second form,to a house where the machines are giving outone at a time, and taking her along.