What is this voice?

What is this voice? What is this deep gruff rumbling? Can’t you hear me yodeling through the rooms, across the decades, down through my children’s dreams and far across the ocean, into my own beloved babyhood? Can’t you remember when I was a shiny bell, descant hitting the alleluias, shivery brightnotes trembling all the way to God’s ear?


Were you there when we shouted down the roofs in ecstasy, delirium, in hopeless thrall to hopeful thrills? When we lost ourselves shouting up the home team in their old-school shorts on the open courts, screaming under the night lights, the gnat storms, when we found ourselves shouting with Gloria, surviving and jiving in shimmying crowds, footsore and juggling our purses and coats but alive, alive, and shouting? 


And when we made our enormous shoutvoices to heavy ropes, holding our children, our frightened, frightening children, from breaking the thing, doing the wrong, crossing the road, crossing the road? 


Oh I have traded in my silvertones for a grumblerough, can you not recognize me in this hairshirt call, my life-encrusted cry?


When did I become a giantess, heavy trunklegs shaking the city, holding my teensy offspring in my crazygentle boat-sized palms, desperate to keep them perfectdelicateclosecloseclose, watching them find all the ways to escape down my wrist, through my fingers, jumping out, off, away, to go be beautiful giants in their own stompcities?


Were you there to see me watch them go, waving my ogress arms, my bamboo-stitched handkerchief, then turning back to my own fields and skyscrapers, my same old roadways and runways? Oh but I can still bellow and bawl. Can’t you hear my roar calling down through the riverbeds, out along the airstrips, echoing through the birds’ nests and goat farms and beaver dams, the forgotten waterfalls and burned-out tree hollows? Can you hear me smalling my whisper down to creep in through windowsills, roll along carpets and memories, hum through curtainshapes, photobooks, peoplehouse rooms and childbeds and rockingchair ghosts? 


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