In my poem “Philomela,” I leave out this mutilation. Strike out Philomela’s sister, Procne, who learns of her sister’s rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Cut the death of Itys, Procne’s son, whom the sisters dismember and boil for punishment, Philomela, mute but grinning, tossing the boy’s head at his father. No metamorphosis of Philomela and Procne into nightingale and swallow, Tereus shrunk into the hoopoe that pursues them. Such details would be unimaginable, I think. Not because a contemporary reader can’t imagine them, but because the details are now too grotesque for her to want to.

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Ovid makes the trio’s transformation occur at the instant syntax shifts from the conditional to the imperfect. “[The girls] went flying…/ [as] if they were on wings. They were on wings!” he writes. The difference between simile and metaphor. The second the mouth conceives it, the imagination turns it into the real.

The Metamorphoses, 6.669–670

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I’m writing “Philomela” at an artists’ colony where I go for daily runs. Sometimes a man in a car will pace me; sometimes a man on his bike will circle back to get another look. Sometimes the men who pass me say nothing.

Around this residency are woods in which, the staff informs us, we can walk. It is beautiful here, and there are olive groves. I do not walk by myself in the woods.

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It’s 1992 and I’m hiking near Loch Ness. It’s after breakfast: I’ve spent the morning alone in a stand of gold aspen that circles the lake. When the three men find me, the smell of beer and whiskey thick on their clothes, bait boxes and fishing rods in hand, I have just sat down with a book. The men are red-eyed, gruff. The first two nod as they pass me: it is the third who walks back. He has lank, gingery hair and black spots in his teeth.

Hello, he says when he reaches me.

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Nightingale: OE nihtegala, niht + galan, small, reddish-brown migratory bird celebrated for its sweet night song during the breeding season. In Dutch, a frog.

Virgil, The Georgics, Book IV:

[A]s mourning beneath the poplar shade the nightingale

laments her lost brood… she sobs

nightlong, and on a branch perched her doleful song

renews—

Shelley, A Defence of Poetry: “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

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Are you an American? he asks. I always wanted to kiss an American.

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