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Telecommunications
deals with the how the speed and responsiveness of communication
affects a friendship. The anchor acts like a black-hole, attracting
the streaming stanzas to it whenever they get within a certain range.
And, like a black-hole, time "slows" down and these streams move
and march more slowly the closer they get to the anchor. This singularity-effect
echoes the arc of the poem, which concerns a friendship, once co-present,
now long-distance, which is slowly dissolving into the silence of
distance. The individual stanzas are snatches of the correspondence
between these two people, one male and one female, as it progresses
from face-to-face to telephone to email and, finally, to letter,
as the geographic distance between them widens with time.
The slowing-down
of the stanzas, both speed- and march-wise, reflects the way in
which these people, in the lulls between (and, finally, the absence
of) communicative acts, replay previous conversations in their heads
- an act of remembrance as well as an act of prognostication, as
each attempts to figure out what is going wrong. In the silence,
all they have are what has been said, and they linger over those
words.
The global temporal
arc reflects the diminishment of communication. The piece begins
with a flurry of conversation, then SILENCE enters, and, slowly,
the quantity of that communication diminishes, until it ceases together,
leaving the reader in visual silence.
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