Again Later

The words of this poem belong to the phone company, not the poet, because they come from the intercept messages that play when the speaker dials her dead husband’s cellphone and landline. These automated messages are the opposite of what a reader might expect from a poem about the loss of the poet’s husband—they are not personal and emotional; to the contrary, they are generic and emotionless. Nonetheless, there is a strong identification between the phone company’s pre-recorded messages and the speaker that begins on the first line and never lets up.

The opening two lines read: “The person you are trying / is not accepting. Is not” (Lines 1-2). On a literal level, this opening comes from the intercept message, but it is also very true of the speaker—the speaker is trying to accept her husband’s death, but is not accepting it; and the fact that she calls his phone numbers (even though she knows they are no longer in service) is an indication that she has not come to terms with her loss. The speaker is in denial about her husband’s death, but her husband is still dead, “[i]s not / at this time” (Lines 2-3).

The third and fourth line turn the bland formality of the phone company’s message into a plea for the husband’s continued existence: “Please / again. The person” (Lines 3-4). The speaker is begging for her husband’s life back, a plea she knows will go unanswered. The “please” here is business-like politeness on the part of the phone company and desperate begging on the part of the speaker. In both cases though, the “please” is hollow, empty.

On the next line, the intercept message repeats what have become the central facts of the speaker’s life: “you are trying is not” (Line 5). The speaker is trying to accept her loss, but is having difficulty doing this. Regardless, her husband is still dead, is still “not” (Line 5). The “not” here is the speaker’s denial and her loss, as well as the phone call that isn’t going through.

Following this “not,” Collins writes:

in service. Please check

that you have. This

 is your call. . . . (Lines 6-8).

The “call” here is both the phone call the speaker placed to her dead husband’s dead line and the speaker’s call of grief and pain. As it has in the lines leading up to this moment, the poem operates on both a literal and a metaphorical level when the speaker writes: “This / is your call” (Lines 7-8).

Next, the words from lines 1-2 repeat with a slight alteration: “Your / person is not accepting” (Lines 8-9). Here instead of “[t]he person you are trying / is not accepting” (Lines 1-2), we are given, “Your / person” (Lines 8-9). The possessive adjective “your” suggests that grief is deeply personal and individual, but the fact that these aren’t the poet’s words but an automated recording suggests that grief is also entirely mechanical, repetitive, and rote. Both these visions of grief are true at once in “Again Later.”

In lines 10-11, the speaker seems to acknowledge that her husband is gone, that the intercept message is what she has left: “Your person is this / number.” In Lines 11-12, however, she quickly rejects this idea again: “You have / not correctly.”

A similar reversal happens in the final lines of the poem:

. . .Your person

 is a recording. Again later

 at this time. Not accepting (Lines 12-14).

These last lines acknowledge that the recording is all that is left of the husband. No matter when the speaker calls—”again,” “later,” or “at this time”—the recording is what she will get, not her husband. The last two words of the poem, however, reject the loss again.

The poem ends with the widow in the same situation as her husband’s out-of-service phone number: “Not accepting” (Line 14).

While the strongest identification in “Again Later” is between the phone company’s pre-recorded messages and the speaker, every line of the poem can also be interpreted as referring to the speaker’s husband. Now that he’s dead, her husband can no longer take in or accept the speaker’s feelings for him. Like his old phone numbers, her dead husband “is not accepting” (Line 2).

Her husband was the widow’s person—the person with which she shared the most. Now that bond is broken. The sentences “Your / person is not accepting” (Lines 8-9); “Your person is this / number” (Lines 10-11); and “Your person / is a recording” (Lines 12-13) could refer to the speaker, but they could also refer to her husband. Thus, in the poem the speaker and her husband are brought together again. This togetherness is as uncomforting as the phone company’s recording—in fact, it is the phone company’s recording—but it exists in “Again Later” nonetheless.

Collins’s use of a pre-recorded phone message to write an elegy is all the more poignant because phone calls from scammers drove her husband to his death.