The Perfect Voice
[I]
What can I say about Bob Dylan?
That some strange, authentic light
passed into him from blind bluesmen
on corners, singing their stories
of trains and chains and hope;
blind bluesmen, miles from any college
or guitar academy, with the wind
at their backs, or their backs
against some wall in East Texas,
playing sublime bottleneck guitar
with the necks of broken bottles.
That he was light-hearted and free
and only twenty,
when he first took to the road,
with ten dollars, a harmonica,
and his guitar;
that he saw Woody Guthrie
signposting the way to go …
and went, with little inclination
to look back on old Duluth,
dying in the moonlight.
That he enrolled early in that authentic,
beaming and screaming college
of real life, and never left it,
because all he needed – all the diverse,
sounds and colours of that authenticity –
met him there and filled his spirit;
that his America was always a place
in which unwanted migrants moved
across railway tracks and truck yards,
seeking somewhere to remain.
That he was young when he left home –
young and ready to change the world forever,
if only he could elude
the Rising Sun’s beckoning sirens;
that he could look north to where the wind
was blasting against the borderline,
yet pluck from his heart
the gentlest of chords …
or walk, arm in arm, with his girl
down the boulevard of broken dreams.
That he understood the essential
difference between someone who sings
and a real singer … how a song
must possess him and keep him close
to the trembling, naked world
which summons songs into being;
that the unfiltered sounds
of all things flowed through him –
all the discordant, muddy voices
of the river that bore the slaves.
That he recounted in fearless detail
the sad tale of Emmett Till: how he was
butchered by a ghostly cohort
of the white-robed Ku Klux Klan;
that he thought long and hard about them,
and about the senseless slaying of Hattie Carroll:
how justice favours those who rule,
rather than those whose small, arduous lives
are shackled to their masters’ tables,
until they die there – violently or otherwise.
That he saw death up close and chose to be
the lonesome traveller whose life task
was to unmask the truth,
in a world where the truth kept dancing ahead,
like some elusive tambourine player;
that he sang in his own way,
with a force that moved the world
and asked big questions about being a man …
what it means … and how to make each choice,
and did it all so earnestly in that perfect voice.
[II]
What can I say about Bob Dylan?
That he was one of the few who protested
vociferously against the masters of war
and fame and greed who reign on earth,
yet never allowed protest to be his
only idiom … never seized the easy option
of allowing his life to become a single
monotonous diatribe in which
every answer to every dilemma is either
black or white, for he had seen
and known so much behind the shades.
That he blew great smoke rings for the mind,
and journeyed deep into the heat of Harlem
to ponder the ephemeral perceptions
of a Spanish gipsy girl, swaying hypnotically
to sounds from worlds beyond hers;
that students in bedsits sat and listened to his records,
and felt the first stirrings of their true selves,
because he was the echo of a vast universe
in which the times were changing,
and the voiceless were beginning to be heard.
That he wore many caps and pillbox hats,
but none he couldn’t easily balance
on his head, or on a bottle of wine
belonging to some Bradford millionaire;
that he was the standard bearer – the high,
lone-flier others had to aim at – the one
who continually watched and listened
as hooded hordes trudged mechanically
back and forth over bridges
leading to factories and groceries and little else.
That he was the song and dance man –
the poet laureate of the people – who arrived
when poetry had been hijacked
by gold-star universities breaking faith
with the innate music of the human heart;
that he honed his craft in East Orange’s
green pastures, where Rita-May
and a few autodidactic free spirits
were his most essential book of knowledge,
in a universe going rapidly nowhere.
That he saw from the beginning how one
who endeavours to be right for everybody,
is wrong for the world,
because the world needs to be challenged
or it won’t wake up … it won’t be shaken
from the siren comforts of its own sedation;
that his voice was forever full of sounds
never heard before him … those long
and rolling songs of thunder … those long
and bittersweet parables of a rolling stone.
That he was a chameleon, a shape-shifter
and did it often to elude his trackers,
who wanted him to remain static,
or be more perfectly like them …
with eyes to make a snake proud;
that he changed his style
from simple ballads to surreal visions,
and was booed and jeered and called ‘Judas’,
but played electrically on,
watched by a laughing raven.
That he built word-pictures, layer by layer,
and was the master of vagueness …
the restless, elusive one, who never wished
to be tied to one place, or one time,
or just one woman – and yet, he offered
sound directions about the best path home;
he offered a clear road map
for the wastelands of Desolation Row,
where survival is a perpetual game of dice,
and did it so pragmatically in that perfect voice.
[III]
What can I say about Bob Dylan?
That he had his own apocalyptic motorcycle
nightmare, on a slippery dawn stretch
of Suicide Road, and afterwards
shunned drink and drugs and stardom
and became eternity’s simple pilgrim;
that he worked obsessively for days
paying sober tributes to his ‘sad-eyed Lady’,
who seemed elusive and difficult to define,
as Quinn the Eskimo kept his distance,
and Louise put the ‘rain’ back in her pocket.
That he felt the rush of the streets
and the solitude of the hills and forests,
and no experience went unwanted,
because everything he did enabled him to see
distinctly the difference between paradise
and the shimmering pleasure house across the road;
that he thought twice about accepting accolades
from pale-egg producing professors
in the henhouse academies of poetry,
where no product outlasts its ‘sell-by’ date.
That he wrote songs with music in them,
songs with meter and rhythm and sharp-eyed
images that would linger in your head,
like some finely condensed film, or an old
well-crafted poem you could actually call a poem;
that highly trained singers sang notes from sheet
music, and strove for perfect diction,
but he was different: he preferred to weave
his voice into the dramatic tapestries he created …
he preferred to be believably tangled up in blue.
That he understood the call of the road
and how the universe itself is a long pathway
back to Eden … back to that first world
which can’t be apprehended
until the journey uncovers it for us;
that his craft was shaped by an intuitive
understanding of how the power of simplicity
can bring timeless scenes to life: a few chords,
a few suggestive phrases, and suddenly
there’s a moon, a girl … and you can almost feel her!
That he was enlightened early about the way
every small success makes
a new and greater effort necessary in order
for inspiration’s gods to smile one’s way again …
to invoke some new vision of Johanna,
or the Faerie Queen;
that he was beset often by the urge
to give up – to go home and live a quiet life
in the arms of the girl from the Red River Shore,
who, of course, had long ago departed.
That he was the jingle-jangle man,
the master-puppeteer behind the white face
and the tambourine
and the many screens of himself …
all so vividly alive and breathing;
that he was the wonder boy,
the burlesque Chaplin of Modern Times,
who shuffled and danced and didn’t care
too much for being modern,
if there was nothing eternal in it.
That he lived and loved and moulded
each experience into the sweetest
or bitterest of sounds, and often placed
them side by side on the same record;
that his art encompassed not only the human heart’s
bright visions of love and paradise,
but visions also of deep, dark places
where he never feared to go … places
where vultures feed on death and desolation,
and Noah is always the first to leave.
That he chronicled the whole flow of hope
and horror from Kennedy to Covid,
from Gandhi to Gallo – and then, for an encore,
conjured a haunting tour-de-force
about a strange wedding between a child
and a prostitute in beautiful Key West;
that he was always going back,
always revisiting the sounds of things imbued
with the magic to outlive their birthplace
and their brief hour upon Time’s loom.
That he was with us from the day
black people had no rights, to the day
a white policeman was arraigned
for applying the full weight of the law
to the neck of a man helplessly gasping for air;
that he was with us, and had his say,
and brought equality and freedom
a few steps closer,
even though it isn’t time yet to rejoice,
and he did it all so knowingly in that perfect voice.
Martin Mc Carthy is a contributing editor to the American poetry website, The HyperTexts. He lives in Cork City, Ireland, where he studied English at UCC and was awarded the H. Dip. in Education. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous print and online publications. He has published three poetry collections: Lockdown Diary (2020), Lockdown (2021), and The Perfect Voice (2023). A fourth collection, The Book of Desire, is currently awaiting publication. He was shortlisted for the Red Line Poetry Prize, and is a nominee for the 2023 Pushcart Prize. The Perfect Voice, his epic SoundCloud tribute to Bob Dylan can be heard here. A limited signed and numbered print edition can be purchased in the store at mccarthypoet.com
MARTIN MC CARTHY POET 