The Blue Moon Review

Death & Telephones
by David Weinstock

A man dies young
	and we snatch at the telephone
as urgently as if  it were 
	a TV doctor's defibrillator
and all stand CLEAR and then BANG
	and bang and bang again
until it is no use
	and please now, please now stop.

How did we die
	before there were telephones?
How did we learn the vital details--
	that he died in his bed
of a heart attack, reading an old book?
	How did we call back
to ask which book it was?
	
To bury one friend 
	takes a hundred phone calls.
Later that month you may read
	the blue bill as an obituary
or a funeral parlor's guest book--
	how this one was called and then
that one, who already knew,
	and then, as an afterthought,
one or two more, and still more.