The small bones work in,
galvanise —
I am shimmering,
SHIMMERING –
Silver-nitrate-seals
my bone-silks, my
salt-blood-sings cold,
cold does not unnerve me.
— from “Fit”
I had read Emilia Philips’ poem “Scar” on the Academy Of American Poets website and had seen some tweets about writing trauma at a time of great preoccupation with my own surgical recovery. A prolonged process. There are ten active folders on my desktop. Four of these are image folders containing artwork that revives and enlivens me. Four of the folders are manuscripts, in proofs, unfinished, or just begun. One of these manuscripts now consists of 13 pages. The last folder, the one that hides amid this great hope, these works in progress, is the scar folder.
The scar folder is eight pages long and runs like a thread from about 2013 to 2019. The poems began long before that and were shifted into the folder over time. I sometimes open it, open the wounds — and imagine that I might add a poem. A hint of a thread connects the poems in the scar folder with poems from each of my books. The thread runs through my book-length poem “The Blind” — where it hid in sewing boxes, in curtain silks, in spider-webs, and in the bone-pick that my neighbour used to unpick her curtain-lining. It was red with my blood during a birthing trauma, botched mending, and scar revision surgeries. It was of white silk in domestic-mending scenarios, of glimpsed steel instruments laid out on blue cloth, or it tied sequins over my wounds in a black evening dress.
The poems from “The Blind” now inhabit the scar folder. Those poems came all at once and insisted on being written. Their vocal exorcism allowed new books to be formed, and I thought that they had gone for good. Circumstances ensured that they had not, and after a long process of healing, “Fit” (excerpted above) emerged. It was added to the folder.
Something changed for me after recovery. The poems did not want to be written or to be revisited. I think that a change in emphasis occurred. The skew or slant on the world caused by physical trauma had altered. Poems emerge as healing things now. Just before I shelved the folder, or hid it, I removed “Fit” and placed it in the new manuscript which can contain it, and not let it dominate or drive the work. Its sister poems are about growing things:
She joy-blossoms,
There is joy,
Often —
— from “Flora”
I don’t know where the new work in progress is going. There isn’t a tension between the growing or the healing aspects of “Fit” and “Flora.” There is a peaceable accommodation between the two poems that suggests a healing. I don’t feel that we get to choose the emphasis of the book that we are writing. But we, as writers, can choose the thematic thrust of a book when it begins to shape itself. The poems emerge organically. So far, the preoccupations inherent in the scar folder have not impinged on the development of my new mss. It makes me happy to think that I won’t be filling the scar folder and that it is static, while other sweeter things come into focus.