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A Tape of Your Voice
May 19, 2005    File under: Tapeworm

found, the small box of sound laid in metal and plastic, gleam
of pregnant dark encased in a milky sleeve, in the bottom
of the desk drawer, one in a box of voices I don't need the tapes

to hear: flex the case to open, the cassette slides out, tongue
from yawn, package of waves just waiting to radiate, radiant
in early-morning-office-window sun, blinding, the friction

of the hinge, of the reels' wheels against the body, almost
inaudible chord of the player's motor, magnetic tape over
the playing head, static of static, static of dust, static of the

fluctuating alternating current along the frayed wire of the
headphones, the gravelly run of your voice through a poem,
an answer to a question I never quite discern, a smoothing

of creekstones beneath the stream: this is the rasp of the
phosphored string, hum of quarter sawn spruce under the
strum, a riff from the universe's deep throat song ascending

here: Rodney Jones said I feel odd hearing a tape of
my own voice / That marks wherever I go, the sound // Of
lynchings, the letters of misspellings / Crooked and jumbled

to dupe the teacher, / Slow ink, slow fluid of my tribe,
meaning // What words mean, when they are given / From
so many voices, I do not know myself / Who is speaking

and who is listening, and I quite agree and wonder
what you would say to this, whether the sound of your own
voice gave you such pause: the tape unrolls, unravels,

and I imagine the magnetic sprawl of your voice, the disposition
of pitch and timbre, the piedmont hills of the wave that could
describe this slow disclosure, this drawl on these homesick drums:

Posted by Jake Adam York at May 19, 2005 6:39 PM