Essay on Voice

The question with poetry:
Should the poet’s voice be in it?
or should it just be—what?
items of data of outer or inner sense?
Voice comes from within,
but toward and from the outside
it’s a bandage, a screen,
a dissembling clown.
Maybe the goal is to be purely without voice,
that interior cock on a fence post.

But how could the voice ever be gone?
What’s left without it? Whatever.
The Black Dog Cafe. The tomatoes.
Alvin and Donna and the orange
metal step stool. How are these items collected
except by being named by the voice?
The voice speaks images, thoughts, feelings
after consciousness registers them.
Does consciousness select them from a flood
of undifferentiated sound and light?
Does it practice journalistic objectivity
as nothing but a recording machine,
a camera?

Maybe the voice expresses
the important feelings of a sensitive person,
even a wise individual who can impart
special truth to us.
I have never imagined myself as such a person.
The poets I love were much too modest
to pretend to be
(except maybe in late, bad poems).
Maybe Jesus Himself, but I equate Jesus
with Socrates, who spent his whole live proving
that no one can be such a person.
But the language used by the voice to speak
was already wise
before Socrates ever set his dialectical wedge.

The voice—consciousness itself—
is two things: desire and meditation.
It can express desire—what’s wrong with that?
It can watch the objects of desire pass by.

Resolution: try to quiet the voice.
It may seem like a barrel of laughs,
but it’s just a barking dog.