Developing Voice

August 27, 2010
from notes on drafts:
[Develop your voice
your singular voice.
Huh?
But I have many voices.]

at last stanza:
When I'm dead will the things that I've said (written) still matter?


Developing Voice
"The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you."
          Thomas Lux, "The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently"


The black & white home movies of the early sixties
silenced my infant voice;
until the reel-to-reel recorded it again one
Christmas morning singing Jingle Bells into the taste
of the aluminum microphone.
A decade later, the tape had stretched its vocal chords
and was no longer recognizable.

I once lost my voice
in high school, auditioning for a role in “The Fantastiks.”
I sang one line and then it just stopped...
as if someone had flicked a switch or a fuse had popped
and I didn't have a penny to fix it.

I found it again
proposing pacifism, debating doctrine, singing psalms;
and again on the sidewalks for the unborn, the uninformed;
and again parading prophetic in ecstatic glossolalia utterance.

There's the voice my children have heard.
There's the voice my grandchildren hear.
There's one for the dog.

My wife knows my voice
          when I'm setting up a bad pun,
          when I'm up on my soap box,
          when I'm asking a question
          or broaching a sensitive subject.
          There is one only she knows
                    when our door is closed
                    or when we're not talking.

I have a telephone voice
and a cell phone voice:
they are different.

It actually goes up
          about half an octave
                    when I'm waiting tables.
This phenomenon seems to affect most servers.

When I try to talk to you,
what if
what if I stut...stut...stutter;
          suppose my syllables slip into lisp;
                    perhaps the words no longer exist.
And what if we don't speak the same language?
¿Y si no hablamos el mismo idioma?
Where I come from, we don't have an accent.

And when my lips are peeled back from my teeth,
and my tongue has been eaten by worms,
will my voice still be heard in the heads of my kids
when they speak to kids of their own?