The day before I was to have my teeth cleaned, I was telling
my wife over the phone how the dentist’s office had said I would be free at
10:00 from their chamber of hooks and mouth vacuums and that ugly, cycloptic
light with the orange bulb they crane over you. Because it sounded like I was
saying 8:10 instead of “at 10:00,” what began as an ordinary comment quickly
turned into a back and forth worthy of my beloved Abbott and Costello.
I
don’t recall mumbling my way through high school or college, though I was soft
spoken, as friends have reminded me. What happened to my voice, I don’t know.
There are times when my speech has been so garbled, I’ve had to apologize and
excuse myself from the phone so I could lick my lips, clear my throat, or open
and close my mouth to loosen the muscles of my face as if I were doing some
kind of demented mouth yoga, anything to try and improve my annunciation so
that I didn’t sound like Boomhauer from King
of the Hill, a character whom I love and, not surprising, have no trouble
understanding.
The
paradox of my mumbling is that when I read a poem out loud, I’ve been told my
words go from being heavy and thick to a soft, crisp baritone. When this
happens, I think I must be engaging more of my body in the act of speaking. My
posture is better. I probably inhale more air and project. I open my lips wider
and wrap them more firmly around each vowel. Performing a poem is almost akin
to entering the Matrix, a place where I’m a better version of myself, minus the
tacky trench coat.
Whenever strangers compliment me
after a reading, I have always assumed they were being kind because to my ear
there’s little difference between my speaking and reading voices. One kind
gentleman went so far as to joke that if the poetry thing didn’t work out,
there was always radio where I could become the voice of America.
“The voice of America” has a nice
ring to it, though I don’t think she would want me to speak for her because
there’s no telling what I might say about how she treats her tired and poor
huddled from sea to shining sea. Worse yet, I might become a voice of “reason”
for the left like Beck or Limbaugh are for the right. If that happened I would
no doubt have nightmares in which my fellow soft baritones like Nat King Cole
and Keanu Reeves would reproach me for misusing my instrument.
It’s better not to anger Neo or the
King. Better to keep my feet on the ground and out of my mouth and instead
write poems about dentists or cartoons or yoga in the hope that centuries from
now my voice might be one of a thousand in a dusty library whispering from the
page about the truth, which never hurt anyone or led people astray, unlike the
Truth that continues to bring nations of innocents to their knees.