Voice by Brian Bartlett

June 20, 2023
Poem title: Voice Poet name: Brian Bartlett Poem: One midsummer night, a man’s broken fury reaches us from the apartment windows beyond our crab-apple tree. Baritone blustering falls upon us like a sports fan’s protests or a deranged dictator’s howls. “Liar! — Moron! — Dickhead!—Shut up, just shut up!” Background murmuring suggests a second person in the room, then the next night, and the next, the same or similar words, as if strangers re-played recorded files of rage to keep us awake when we want sleep, to tell us that lunar-blessed good humour and calm are frauds, the true nature of our species to bicker under the moon. No slurring, no hints of drunkenness. Is he a new neighbour who will be with us for years, or an out-of-town visitor, soon to disappear before we see his face or learn his name? 1 a.m., a week later, his tempo and tone have changed, too urgent to be mellow, yet story-telling—“home,” “sister,” “misunderstand,” “won’t trust me”—in well-built sentences as if, alone, he were practising a script, or trying out an autobiographical sketch on nobody but the mute night, unaware how clear his voice is, how well it travels from yard to yard. We’re unsure whether to press our faces into the window screen to hear better— or step back into ourselves and slide the panes shut against the nakedness of those words. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Brian Bartlett Previously published in Grain, 50.4 (Summer 2023) Brian Bartlett has published seven collections and eight chapbooks of poetry, including The Watchmaker’s Table, Wanting the Day:Selected Poems and The Afterlife of Trees. His other works included a selection of his prose on poetry, and three books of nature writing, most recently Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal. Bartlett has also edited several volumes of other poets’ selected poetry, and Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems. Since 1990 he has lived in Kjipuktuk/Halifax.