It’s easier than ever before,
what with our mini communicators
in our pockets, to fire off

an electronic love note or,
for the young ones, as a last resort,
to make a phone call,

which, now that I have reached
old fart-dom myself, I wish to
nudge the young ones

into doing, because, I have learned
with each passage of a dearest
one, that their voices are what

we miss most after they no longer
exist in life. Like my father’s voice,
garbled on my mother’s answering

machine, nearly impossible to
understand after 20 years gone,
touches me every time I hear it.

No matter how much electronic
evidence they leave behind, those
precious voices saying your name

in the way that was just so them,
you’ll hold only in your memory—
a different kind of cloud, and,

you come to realize, just as
unreachable as those delicate
filaments of cirrus drifting so

high overhead right now.