Self-Portrait of the Universe as History of the Telephone

Although generally credited to Alexander Graham Bell, Wikipedia insists the invention of the telephone was the culmination of work done by many individuals.

Bell rushed to patent electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying   vocal or other sound

but he could not patent the sound of a whisper on wire, my sister’s voice calling from an through the HVAC grate on the floor.

In the year I graduated high school, Italy’s parliament dedicated a postage stamp to Antonio Meucci, whose early voice communicating device, the telettrofono, allowed two persons, separated at a considerable distance to communicate  via sound concentrated upon the wire.  

My mother began taking night classes at the community college, and my sister and I searched the floppy tongues of payphones for spare change.  This is not a dry run. This is your life, Dr. Laura insisted from a speaker overhead, all her callers on hold waiting for someone to play their song.  

The use of the telephone gives little room for reflection, wrote a British newspaper columnist in 1899. It is possible, too, to be always on the tenterhooks of expectation and desire: expectation of being ‘called up’ by some one, and desire to call some one else up. Thus may life be made miserable by the very attempt to make it easy and happy.

The wife of the first man I fell in love with caught on to us by scouring the family’s phone bills. 

two persons, separated at a considerable distance         life    made miserable    by the attempt to make it  

something else.

In 1933 the New Yorker reported that early telephone users worried the devices were dangerous: [People] were afraid that if they stood near one in a thunderstorm they might get hit by lightning. 

Even if there wasn’t any storm, the electric wiring might give them a shock. When they saw a telephone in some hotel or office, they stood away from it or picked it up gingerly.

I was nine years old when my mother moved our rotary phone to the corner of the basement after replacing the upstairs line with a shiny, new push-button one.

Why I chose to use the old phone to invite Amanda Benko over to roller skate, I cannot not tell you except that maybe the privacy of it felt like my own personal teletrofono. 

the party        at the other end of the line                      electric  

The line crackled as I dialed, and when Amanda’s mother answered, she could not hear me asking to speak with her daughter. She put Amanda’s father picked up the receiver.

 the ear   a   tenterhook  of expectation

I’ll kill you if you call again, he said. 

I’ll gut you like a brook trout. I’ll split you open and eat what I find.

Sarah Carson is the author of two prose poetry collections, Buick City (Mayapple Press) and Poems in which You Die (BatCat Press), as well as the forthcoming How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books). Her poetry and other writing has appeared in Diagram, Brevity, Guernica, the Minnesota Review, and others. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.