1. In the morning my voice feels like a lost horizon, a longshoreman headed for home at daybreak. The sun warming the edges of the ridges to the west. The stars weren’t quite ready to let go of all that indigo serenity. Perhaps the moon is setting, the lump in my throat reminds me to stay in the present tense, this day, this new beginning, is all that there is. Beginning now.
When I was a child, my voice was soft as warbling birds and singing was a second nature. My voice was a thin, reedy wind coming down from the ridgetops, its sighing having emanated deep in the pines. Those sighs followed me, my voice took on the stubbornness of stone, like the layers of ribbon chert laid down long ago beneath the seafloor. All the detritus of living transformed into metamorphic rock, into these mountains I call home.
My voice is closest to the earth, when I dream, because in dreams, my voice becomes the wings of small birds, escaping on the wind as I traverse the landscape of my psyche.
My mother, tired of hearing a child’s monotonous sing-song, told me to either sing or shut up. I love to sing, my voice was like the blackbirds in the cattails lining the pond. So I put it away in a box never letting it out of sight. But my voice wanted to scry on the updrafts and thermals, circling the valley of memory and the past.
2. Born with a foot in my mouth, always saying what was forefront has let me down dark alleyways were the thugs of acceptability dictated decorum with an iron fist. What speech should contain. Speak American, they said, flatten your vowels. Say often without the t, say narrow and arrow without the w morphing into an r. I had to learn a syntax that differed from the Irish lilt and cadence of home. I mourn for the loss of those speech acts. For that lilt is the music of my ancestral tongue.
Why I became a poet was because my voice was part of the unwashed masses, those stories that are not often heard, because towing the line, keeping one’s toes to the self was the only acceptable outcome. But I had a bill of laden, a writing invoice for a bill was long past due.
Distracted by the voices in my head, I didn’t know they were the beginnings of poems, but I couldn’t write, I was traumatized on every front. Call it dyslexia, call it, ADHD, call it PTSD. It doesn’t change the experience or the outcome. I didn’t learn to read until the end of third grade. And then I spent the rest of my life, trying to catch up.
Abandoned by both my parents, living with my grandmother, meant that family gatherings and holidays always ended up in rows or battles— my mom and her sisters having felt slighted so many decades ago, nursed the embers of their grudges into flame through the ages.
I watched in horror what happened if you let your voice out uncensored. There was a family friend, Richard Lake, who, after a round of drinking down at the lodge, decked, his wife, Alice, in our dining room.
I watched in horror what happened if you let your voice out uncensored. There was a family friend, Richard Lake, who, after a round of drinking down at the lodge, decked, his wife, Alice, in our dining room.
She flew backward like a large dancing doll, the kind you strapped to your hands and feet with elastic bands, so you could waltz around the room, only she landed on her back, the house resounded like a drum rattling the Waterford crystal in the china cabinet. I saw firsthand what happened when women spoke aloud. Granted, they were drunk, but a fist to the jaw left an indelible impression.
And our neighbors across the way solidified that notion. That was how Lucian silenced his wife, Agnes, when he came home from sea. A merchant marine, later a ship’s captain, his mind was bent to authority. No wonder she drank, in sublimation for having an absentee husband who brokered no deals, or accepted any half-truths, when it came to an opinion that differed from his.
And our neighbors across the way solidified that notion. That was how Lucian silenced his wife, Agnes, when he came home from sea. A merchant marine, later a ship’s captain, his mind was bent to authority. No wonder she drank, in sublimation for having an absentee husband who brokered no deals, or accepted any half-truths, when it came to an opinion that differed from his.
No wonder she, who could have no children because her husband gave her gonorrhea, told strangers in bars that I had no socks. They cried crocodile tears. And the cycle continued. No breath, no voice. No, the dynamics were not lost on me. Sure it was fueled by alcohol, but that also informed my void and instructed my being.
3. Mine was the voice of white-hot rage, so unacceptable in this society, especially from a girl child. I was supposed to step back and let the boys shine. They dominated the classrooms. But I also saw in their voices, when they strayed too far, Harry Roche, the tennis champ, threw erasers and lumps of chalk at us. But still they were encouraged, they were the chosen ones, allowed to blossom while the girls took a backseat in the classroom.
3. Mine was the voice of white-hot rage, so unacceptable in this society, especially from a girl child. I was supposed to step back and let the boys shine. They dominated the classrooms. But I also saw in their voices, when they strayed too far, Harry Roche, the tennis champ, threw erasers and lumps of chalk at us. But still they were encouraged, they were the chosen ones, allowed to blossom while the girls took a backseat in the classroom.
I had no interest in stepping down, or having the right answers. I saw what could happen to those women who spoke their minds. That’s when I became voiceless, and wore a long sentence of shame and guilt for not fitting in. I tried, and I was never successful. So I retreated to the hills with my horse, who needed few kind words to climb the ridges. How we traveled to the summit, where, in the distance, Tomales Bay shown like a sword, a fault line between two continents.
My mother once told me that when I was very young, barely more than a toddler, she overheard me telling myself that I was a bad girl, a bad girl. I was probably playing with a yarn doll my grandmother made because it was a time before there was a Barbie, when acceptable dolls had china-blue eyes that moved, rimmed with thick eyelashes, golden ringlets, and wore fancy dresses of the antebellum south.
My mother loved to dress me up like those dolls. I hated the itchy dresses with their Peter Pan collars, and Maryjanes with their frothy, white ankle-socks. My hands were occupied with a rabbit skin purse and a matching fur muff. After church, I loved dragging my toes, the rasping sound of those scuffed shoes on pavement, a little guttural voice that gave me pleasure in the lower chakras. I felt it deep in my bones as if my shoes were speaking to me of the earth’s darkest buried secrets.
But I felt betrayed by the garden when I picked a bouquet of geraniums and worms crawled out from inside the thick stems. I was horrified, the known world was corrupted from within. Nature raw in tooth and claw.
Perhaps in revenge for having to bow to all that social conformity, I cut off one long braid, the left one, ribbon and all. A synaesthete, I was in love with the raspy metallic sound of the scissors struggling against hair, so like the scissor-squitching of bluejays in the trees. That basso profundo massage soothed something in my psyche.
My mother once told me that when I was very young, barely more than a toddler, she overheard me telling myself that I was a bad girl, a bad girl. I was probably playing with a yarn doll my grandmother made because it was a time before there was a Barbie, when acceptable dolls had china-blue eyes that moved, rimmed with thick eyelashes, golden ringlets, and wore fancy dresses of the antebellum south.
My mother loved to dress me up like those dolls. I hated the itchy dresses with their Peter Pan collars, and Maryjanes with their frothy, white ankle-socks. My hands were occupied with a rabbit skin purse and a matching fur muff. After church, I loved dragging my toes, the rasping sound of those scuffed shoes on pavement, a little guttural voice that gave me pleasure in the lower chakras. I felt it deep in my bones as if my shoes were speaking to me of the earth’s darkest buried secrets.
But I felt betrayed by the garden when I picked a bouquet of geraniums and worms crawled out from inside the thick stems. I was horrified, the known world was corrupted from within. Nature raw in tooth and claw.
Perhaps in revenge for having to bow to all that social conformity, I cut off one long braid, the left one, ribbon and all. A synaesthete, I was in love with the raspy metallic sound of the scissors struggling against hair, so like the scissor-squitching of bluejays in the trees. That basso profundo massage soothed something in my psyche.
I drifted into a public silence that was to last for decades. The world was not to be trusted. Especially adults. What had I gotten myself into with this life? It wasn’t supposed to be like this, that much I knew. Even then. That was how I drifted into writing.
Later, I felt betrayed by my own voice when I was labeled a soprano. I took voice lessons after an accident to strengthen a punctured lung and to get my breath back. The bel canto and vibrato exercises made my cranium and nasal passages itch. It was contrary to think of myself as a soprano, because in high school I learned to sing alto, I guess there was a shortage of altos in the choir. And though I sang in a choir for years, no one ever thought to test my voice.
And, after a lifetime, there I was, labeled difficult, with a voice synonymous with that of no power, a voice of no authority. But I had already dropped my vocal register, and deepened my speech in order to be taken seriously, wanting that gravelly depth of voice which was made of the faultlines of the earth, but not that of the birds of the air.
2/25/23 Patrice Vecchioni, Write your voice
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