The phone wires crossed the sky like a musical staff. Five lines and you could play a symphony on them if you were a bird. The birds sat on the phone wire and they were the notes. A pigeon was a whole note. A sparrow was a sixteenth. The telephone wire was the last thing connecting the buildings to each other. One wire from your apartment to the pole and from the pole to the next pole and from that pole to your mother's apartment on Rivington Street. Your voice traveled on a wire. You could almost see it moving.

The phone company put the wires up in the 1880s and by 1920 the sky over the Lower East Side was a spiderweb. Wires going everywhere. Crossing. Tangling. Sagging in the summer heat and snapping in the winter ice. When a wire came down in a storm it lay in the street like a dead snake and everybody walked around it because everybody knew a wire on the ground could kill you. The wire was alive. It carried voices and it carried voltage and you did not touch it unless you were the phone company or you were crazy. Sometimes those were the same thing.

The telephone pole was the tallest thing on the block that was not a building. It stood on the corner with its crossbars and its insulators and its transformer and it hummed. You could hear it at night when the street was quiet. A low electric hum. The sound of every conversation on the block traveling through the wood. The telephone pole knew everything. Every argument. Every love call. Every lie. The pole held it all and said nothing. The most discreet structure in New York City was a piece of wood on the corner.

I used to sit on the fire escape and watch the birds on the phone wire. They arrived at dusk. Starlings mostly. They lined up like an audience. I played guitar on the fire escape and the birds sat on the wire and I told myself they were listening. They were not listening. They were waiting for the heat to rise off the wire because the wire was warm and the bird was cold and the bird was smarter than the musician. But I liked the idea. A concert for birds. An audience on a wire. The most honest audience I ever had because they stayed for the warmth and not for the music.

The phone wires are underground now. Or they are gone entirely because nobody needs a wire when you have a satellite. The sky over the Lower East Side is clean. No wires. No birds sitting on wires. No hum at night. The conversations still happen but they travel through the air now, invisible, and the birds have to find somewhere else to sit. The sky is empty and the conversations are everywhere and nobody can see them. The phone wire was the last visible connection between people. Now the connection is invisible. Faster. Clearer. Invisible. The birds lost their seats. The sky lost its music.

See also: Phone Booth, Fire Escape