“Trauma and its aftermath is the subject of so many books we write, the books we read, the poems and work that our students turn in. A bold note, an endless lake, bone / blooming in the desert / the parking lot. The impossible floral stench of reaching out / of our desire to speak / on something like our own terms. I think this is part of why / we try to do this / to write what is unspeakable / unquotable. A desire to try to insist on what an event or events cut out / from under us / the possibility of control, of memory, of time, of why. Writing about what happened to you / the happening of you / feels like giving each other / you and a ghost that is also you / fruit. I’m thinking of Ella Longpre’s writing here / a line that haunts me / that holds me. “I tried to write a lyric essay on abortion and ended up with a collection of vignettes in which women give each other fruit,” says Longpre in an essay about writing the traumatic event called, ‘The Event Vanishes.’ I sit inside this line so often, I think, because it enacts something like the intimacy of being / present for another / being. The scraped out / hope of it. Is this a portrait of listening / through language and outside of language? I want to say, yes. In the giving of fruit I feel there is / also the attempt of sharing the experience that may also be suffering / or, at least an attempt to carry alongside. An act of writing the details (or refusing the enter the details) / of what happened to you / enacts the impossibility of carrying so much within one body. An act of writing that is also a question / of who will help you / carry it all.”
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