Beginning with a Japanese man Itaru Sasaki in 2011 who installed
a phone in his garden so he could call his cousin passed away
from cancer, soon after the Tsunami had washed away 15, 550 lives
on the coast of Sendai, Japan, before hitting the Fukushima plant.
A small, windowed booth with desk, notebook and pen and
old rotary telephone connected only to the wind and air,
a place to release his grief and speak to the souls of loved ones
in the sky. Wind phones began to appear and proliferate
across the planet where wind connected the loss and spoke
to unfinished pain and love, things never said that could be
spoken in waves, booths appearing at the edges of cemeteries
and gardens like living things themselves, from Levack, Ontario
to Cippolini PL, Italy, to Ellensburg, Washington and Mayfield Green
Kansas, rotary boxes placidly fitting into the scenery of the
dead, waiting for the ring on the other side of the hill, beneath
seasonal changing trees, the daughter of 25 called by her mother
who never said enough, but now in bereavement catching up
by the cemetery in Ashville, North Carolina, a caboose red
glassed-in booth where she talked and miraculously knew
her daughter was listening, in some inescapable connection
carried by the breeze, somewhere in dreams a returned call
maybe or a fleeting message like an echoed thought, a
promise of things seen and unseen. A phone in a rock
on the island of Rhoscolyn, Wales, seabirds swirling and
singing back carrying the windswept words from creatures
and the sea-rhythms without static or time, for the eternal
voice of loved ones knows no greater gift but to feel spirits
of loved ones are alive, on the line, trembling through the wire
like a channel receptor to heaven, breaking through with a voice
that listens in silent bright light, waiting for anyone to pick up
the receiver and simply say, I’m here, I’m always here.