I suspect it helped, not knowing what to call what happened in the woods. Not having the word, or refusing a word, forced me to imagine my own, allowed me both the privacy of my grief and the invention of private rituals to heal this grief. Keeping my attack secret also shielded me from the very real possibility of being called a hysteric. In that sense, silence protected me. Would I have grieved differently if someone had given me a legal term, a support group, a brochure?

Over time, shame and rage have abated. But not the memory. And not, at times, the overwhelming certainty that one day soon I will not be lucky again.

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The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn’t heard, it’s longed for. “Heard melodies are sweet,” Keats writes, “but those unheard / are sweeter.” The healing voice of the nightingale is only beautiful when lodged in the imagination (“Jug jug,” Eliot croons). The song stops, the nightingale dies, and once more we descend into silence.

Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 11-12

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” II, 27

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Sappho saw the nightingale as a messenger of springtime and renewal. Pliny the Elder said the bird could sing more than one song; nightingales engage in singing contests, their songs changing over time. The song, then, is not generic but individualized, depending on the hour of day and also on the season. In poetry, the song may be one of suffering and loss; in nature, it is simply one of life.

Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, Book 10, Chapter 43

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Does the bird sing or does it not sing? Is it a symbol for what threatens to overwhelm our senses or for what permanently transforms? The bird is death. No wonder Keats imagines himself dying when he hears it. No wonder he scratches out the speech of Lavinia’s tormentors in his copy of Shakespeare: silence will come for him, as well as for her, and for all of us. There is no shame in it. Death attends our longing for the song. Sing, for you are voiceless. Sing, for it cannot matter. Sing, for soon no one will hear you again.

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I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part of transformation is always a curse. I am what I always was. Perhaps it is sentimental to suggest violence has given me meaning, that the heart of poetry was only silence. Madness to say, yes, there’s pain, but would I have changed without it?

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