Perhaps the greatest desire a victim of violence has is to look at that violence dispassionately in memory. But remembering, the heart pounds, the body floods with adrenaline, ready to tear back off into flight. For some, there is no smoothing chaos into memory. Poetry, with its suggestion that time and pain can be ordered through language, strains to constrain suffering. It suggests, but rarely achieves, the redress we desire. Language does not heal terror, and if it brings us closer to imagining the sufferer’s experience, this too does not necessarily make us feel greater compassion but a desire for further sensation. If we cannot articulate pain beyond inspiring in the listener a need for revenge, we speak only of and to the body.

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Philomela’s first communication of pain is visual: as in a film, her tortures scroll action by action across her tapestry. Like a film, these images manipulate emotion: Philomela’s pain cannot be relieved except through equivalent, mimetic actions that heighten the need for, but never achieve, the catharsis denied the original sufferer.

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What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting, thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our presence only increases her suffering?

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Sufferance: ME soffrance and Latin suffrer, patient endurance; the suffering of pain, trouble, damage, wrong; sanction, consent, or acquiescence.

Suffer: to cause pain; also, to endure pain.

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That the branches of poetry are silence and sufferance.

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In my poem “Philomela,” the woman who has been raped inherits—years after her attack—an antique sewing machine from her grandmother. She imagines using this machine to sew a quilt on which she will embroider figures of the domestic life her grandmother ruefully noted she did not have: a house, a child, a man. But after a few minutes’ contemplation, she boxes up the machine, slides it high up on a bedroom shelf. What is she communicating? Who would she be speaking to? She can always return to the quilt, she tells herself, but in the unwritten rest of the poem I imagine for her, she never will.

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Not rape, I say, meaning certain body parts and not others were used, meaning I do not cede that last ignominy to him, will never name how I lay in the dirt and ground my screams back down into me. But what is the word for what I experienced after? What is the word for how I awoke to fear and never went back to sleep?

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Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares to come—

At some point, the nightingale falls silent. Time erases the song by numbing the wound, replacing it with fresh complaints: new hurts the singer can’t yet fathom.