PHILOMELABecause her grandmother lovedthe arts, her father said, she'd willedthe money to a distant cousinworking as a sculptor. A decisionmade the month before she'd diedfrom cancer, which the young womancan not now believe was dueonly to a brain tumor, having enduredthe last, deliberate ways her grandmother askedwhy she'd never married.The cousin, who inherited the money,showed her sculptures in a converted barn:the only space large enough to containthe seething shapes that seemed to flameup from their pedestalsin precarious arcs. An audacityof engineering the young womantried not to see as a reproachwhen, curious, she visited:how the sculptures made her feeltoo earth-bound, solid. At the gallery,she stared a long while at what she thoughtwas a tree blasted by lightning,but the more she looked, the more clearlyshapes emerged. Therewere a man's hands gripping a slender figureby the waist, the thin body writhing,frozen in his arms. It wasa girl, she saw, with shreddedbark for breasts and dark charred woodfor legs, as if the limbs had been snatchedfrom a fire while burning.Her twig hands rakedher captor's face. The young womancould read no emotion on it,however: the plank facehad been scraped clean; all the fearand anger burned instead insidetheir twisting bodies: she could seethe two there stuck at a pointof perfect hatred for each other: shefor his attack, he for her resistance,perhaps the beauty he could notstand in her, as her last date in collegehad hissed, "You thinkyou're so fucking pretty," spitting itinto her face so that she'd had to turnher cheek to wipe it, which was whenhe'd grabbed her arm then, pinning her-- Was this why her cousin had been chosen, to makewhat she'd had no words for?Persephone, the piece she stoodamazed before had been titled: the last,unconscious gift of her grandmother. "For your wedding," she'd saidher last week, pointingto her own open palm in whichnothing rested. Perhapsher grandmother had imagineda gold ring there. Perhaps a stringof thick pink pearls. The young womandrove home from the gallery, took a shower,and did not tell anyone that daywhat it was she'd seen. A month later,in the mail, a package camefrom her father: her grandmother's Singersewing machine, its antique brass wheelscrubbed of gold, the wooden handleglossy with vines of mother-of-pearl.It was lovely, and for a momentshe considered sewing a quilt with it,onto which she might embroidershooting stars in reds and saffron, the figureof a child, perhaps, or of a manby a house's courtyard, his hatin his hands, his broad bodynaked, harmless. How much thread would that taketo make? she wondered. And considered ita long while before packing upthe machine again, sliding it backinto its wood crate and high up onto a shelfof her basement closet. The placeshe kept her college books and papers,where she told herself it could wait.NIGHTINGALE: A GLOSS Nay, then I'll stop your mouth. Shakespeare, Titus AndronicusLanguage is the first site of loss and our first defense against it. Which is why after Philomela's brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump writhing at her feet. *In my poem "Philomela," I leave out this mutilation. Strike out, too, Philomela's sister, Procne, who learns of her sister's rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Cut the death of Itylus, 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. *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.Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 669-670 *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 ever walk by myself in the woods. *It's 1992 and I'm hiking near Loch Ness. It's just 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 to rest with my 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. *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, The Defense of Poesy: "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." Excerpted from Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
