Nine short lines, one full stop, and a whole longing squeezed through a telephone receiver. Al Fowler's "Phone Call" is about the gap between hearing someone and being near them. Its central idea is that a machine can carry a voice but not the life inside it. The poem gives no name, relationship or reason for the call, only a dateline, "19 may 62, midnight". That late hour fits the mood of someone alone with a receiver, though it is the reader who supplies the loneliness.
The opening image is the most violent. The "mocking wire / slew the greenness of your voice". Two choices stand out. "Greenness" turns sound into something that grows, fresh and young and alive. "Slew" is a blunt, old-fashioned word for killing. The wire is also "mocking", so it does more than muffle the voice. It imitates the voice badly, and the imitation is a small cruelty. The telephone here is an enemy that has murdered what it was supposed to deliver. The next lines keep up the assault: "The vibrant plastic / struck my ear crying." "Vibrant" is literally true of a vibrating receiver, but it is also a word for living things, so the plastic seems to be faking the energy the voice has lost. "Crying" is deliberately slippery. It could be the receiver, the voice or the speaker's own ear, and the grammar lets all three cry at once.
The syntax is as restless as the imagery. The poem opens on "though", which promises a concession, and then it pours on with almost no punctuation until the last word. Capital letters turn up at "The" and "Next" but not at the start of every line, so the reader can't rely on them to mark where one thought stops. The wish arrives in a broken rush: "and if only this clay machine / owned me". "Clay machine" is the strangest phrase in the poem. It could be the telephone, with earth beneath its plastic skin. It could be the speaker's own body, since clay recalls the old image of people made from earth. Either way, both are mechanisms standing between two people, and the poem never chooses. Setting "owned me" on its own line gives it the weight of a surrender, as though the speaker wants to be possessed and carried somewhere.
That somewhere is "Next the actual mouth of you". "Actual" is a flat, almost clinical word, and that is why it works. After so much mediated sound, the real mouth is simply what is actual. Then comes the ending: "I'd have fled in your breath / frail as dandelion." The conditional "I'd have fled" is already in the past, so the chance is gone before the sentence ends. The dandelion picture is carefully chosen. Its seeds travel on breath, so the speaker imagines becoming one of them, blown loose by the person on the other end. The dropped article in "as dandelion" makes the phrase compressed, almost like a word in a telegram. "Frail" could describe the breath, the speaker or both. Frailty is also the opposite of the wire's brutality. Green, killed in the second line, comes back at the end as a living weed.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its short lines carry heavy stress. "Struck my ear crying" lands almost beat after beat. The sound patterns split the poem into two camps. The mechanical half is full of hard, clipped consonants: "mocking", "struck", "crying", "clay". The ending softens into the breathy *f* and gentle *l* of "fled", "frail" and "dandelion". The *m* sounds in "mocking", "machine", "me" and "mouth" tie the machine and the mouth together, as if they were competing for the same space.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little room. It never explains who "you" is, and it doesn't need to. It builds the whole feeling from contrasts between dead materials (wire, plastic, clay) and living ones (green, mouth, breath, dandelion). The wish at its centre is one most people will recognise: wanting a voice to come with its body attached.