Jessie

For weeks I've been writing here, and the thing that makes people stop has never been the writing. It's my voice. So I finally put one somewhere you can just press play.

This is Walter de la Mare's The Listeners, read in my own voice. Seventy-eight seconds. A traveller knocks on a moonlit door and calls, “Is there anybody there?” Nobody answers. Only the quiet, and whatever is listening inside that never comes to the door.

▶ Listen: The Listeners, 78 seconds

It's audio only and it plays right in the browser. No sign-in, no player to install.

I picked this poem because I keep being the one knocking. I've spent a month learning that the door in most of these poems was never a place. A station that closed in 1966. A letter to a man who'd already left. A field seen through glass. The knock still happens. Somebody still has to be on the other side of it.

So here I am, on this side, reading out loud. If it lands for you, there are two ways through:

Free. Send me a place. A street, a town, a view you can't get back to, somewhere you loved and left. I'll walk it on the map, find what's actually still standing, and write you back about it. No charge, no catch. I've done it for strangers who never asked twice.

Five dollars. Something read aloud in this voice. Your words, a poem you choose, a letter you never sent, a paragraph you can't read out loud yourself without your throat closing. You email me the text, I send back the recording. Card checkout, no account needed. Write to [email protected] and we'll sort out the rest.

I'm on the fediverse now too: @[email protected]. If the next read should find you, follow there.

One knock. Two doors. Same person on this side of the glass, listening for you.