Hi.
I'm so happy to be back in Tucson and to see all of you,
and I'm so honored to be here reading at the Poetry Center
this evening.
It's such a joy to be here with all of you,
so thanks for joining us this evening.
I'm going to read from a couple of different pieces
this evening.
This first piece is excerpts from a chapter
in Detailing Trauma called "This Suturing of Wounds or Words."
And this is a project, I guess I will say,
that I started when I took my EMT training years and years
ago and discovered that medical language is amazing and really
quirky and beautiful and poetic, and knew immediately
that I was going to eventually write
a project using that language.
"This Suturing of Wounds or Words."
"One, Skin.
My friend Nina archives and restores old films.
Their bodies accumulate everything from dust
to mold to dirt, shrink and become brittle, crack
or start to break apart.
They're decaying from old age.
The sprockets along the edges rip open.
They store the old films in what basically amount
to caverns in a cliff wall.
The temperature is kept at 36 degrees and 10% moisture.
The archive is buying time, trying
to keep the film bodies from aging,
from decaying any further before they can
be copied onto another body.
There are so many ways we try to buy time as well.
Not caves at 36 degrees but almost everything
else you can imagine has been attempted at some point--
serums made from placentas, cell injections
from the tissues of fetal animals, elixirs, ointments,
drugs, hormones, dietary supplements, cryonics, alchemy
and the use of precious metals for eating
utensils, monkey gall bladders, bathing in beer,
bathing in special springs, injecting human growth hormone
or injecting botulinum toxin into the skin,
rubbing in honey or balm or ejaculate
to keep the skin soft.
The prospect of brittleness is terrifying.
Nature takes us from conception through our years
of procreative possibility with robust vigor.
After that, our body's role, in an evolutionary sense, is done.
There are varying theories about aging.
One holds that aging events are random, cumulative,
and microscopic, that there is a slow accumulation of damage
to cell membranes, that chemical reactions eventually
bind together those molecular structures that work best
when separate--
proteins, nucleic acid, and collagen.
Another theory proposes that aging is simply genetically
programmed into our cells.
They have a set lifespan, a genetic timetable.
When melanocytes, the cells that give our hair its melanin
pigment, wear out during midlife, they are not replaced.
Gray hairs ensue.
The prospect of brittleness is terrifying.
We pump tissues full of silicon, needles
into lips to keep them plumped as though they
were pillows to be propped up.
Even after bodies are deanimated,
we push fluids through the veins,
for some reason trying to hold them plumped, inflated.
Two, laceration."
And I should say, and I apologize if this
is a bit much for any of you.
This is a little medically graphic,
so if you're squeamish, maybe plug your ears.
"Two, laceration.
In older age, as our skin thins and becomes
more delicate, more easily wounded,
we may sustain wet tissue paper tears
as a result of fairly minor trauma.
But even before the skin thins and brittles with time,
it is such a vulnerable body layer--
soft, pliable, thin.
We wound like ripe fruit, bruised and leaking open.
Lacerations to the skin may be clean and linear
if they are caused by a knife, glass
shard, or other sharp object.
They may be caused by slicing at an angle,
separating an entire flap of skin like a peninsula.
Crushing injuries, caused by a direct blow or impact,
may cause a stellate laceration, irregular in its course.
If deep enough, a laceration may reveal underlying tissues,
fat, muscle, tendon, or bone.
Deep wounds sometimes accompany underlying bone fracture.
It's even possible for the broken bone
to cause the laceration to the skin, sharp splintered ends
jutting through what was intact.
But broken bone is not the only way we are shattered or sliced.
Whole worlds can fracture in an instant,
leaving us reeling with lacerated ribbons of flesh
or self.
Whole worlds can fracture without a word of warning.
The most striking thing about fracture is the way it arrives.
You can be going about the most mundane day you've ever
experienced in your life, nothing unusual,
nothing to give you pause.
Indeed, it's like every single other time
you've ever done this particular thing you are doing--
walking home in the evening, biking
to work on a sunny morning, stepping into the car.
You are thinking about other things.
You are smiling at something your students said
this afternoon, or you are feeling your legs
as they push against the pedals and extend,
feeling your bike soar as you coast downhill.
And then suddenly, like a dropped fruit splitting open,
a rough voice on the sidewalk behind you
or this shrieking scrape of metal against metal
or the unexpected thud of something heavy hitting
the sidewalk.
Once, I was biking home through a grocery's parking lot
in New Mexico.
A large pickup truck hit me from behind.
What I remember was the disorientation--
an inexplicable physical impact, the instantaneous rupture
of normal, the sense of being violently
jolted apart from everything that I thought I was doing.
Trauma is a shear in ordinary blacktop,
a fissure in the everyday fabric,
like flannel being ripped, the shredding
of each fiber in a mostly straight line, the frayed edges
that result, the way the cloth loses its flat plane,
becomes irregularly stretched and taut, gaping and baggy.
When you get there on the ambulance,
you can see it in their eyes, the shock of it,
the rupture, like everything they've
ever known to be true just dissolved into nothing.
A snowy road in Wyoming with red rock upthrusts on all sides.
And then the wind swirls, and the road is gone.
And all you can see is white.
You can feel you're still moving.
Posts swell into sight and then disappear again, just
missed in the slide.
Are you moving forward?
Sideways?
Riding home and the bicycle and the ambulance
in the street, the man with his patella torn open and apart,
the foot so shredded it's no longer a foot.
My brother's girlfriend called him the three times
she cut herself, long streaking slices
in the arms, he the bandage, the clotting agent.
There are many questions raised of Quik-clot
and other commercial clotting agents.
One type has been known to stay in the bloodstream,
forming clots long after the need has passed,
traveling eventually to the brain
and causing cerebral embolism and stroke.
Another, in powder form, blew into the eyes of soldiers
in desert winds, damaging their vision.
All clotting powder must be removed
from the wound before physicians can suture,
a lengthy cleaning process, blooming
wound on this terrain of skin.
Three, debridement.
And after, after we are wounded, after our world
is shattered by loss, reassurance is hard to come by.
The precipice is still a precipice from the other side,
from the bottom.
We find ourselves a shaky, knitted-together place
to stand, are, perhaps, a little purified,
like rising from flames, by the absoluteness of it, by having
lost what was unbearable, unsurvivable to lose,
and finding ourselves still breathing.
But that's all we are at this moment, still
breathing but broken, and at the bottom of this very
tall precipice with no clue as to how to ascend back
to the flat plains of the living,
back, with at least one foot, into the land of pretending
again--
we are safe.
Those we love are safe.
There is no precipice.
Doctors may choose to surgically remove dead or damaged tissue
to promote the healing of a laceration.
This is known as debriding the wound
and is most often done to create clean wound edges
and decrease scarring or to remove
infected and necrotic tissue.
What is it that happens as fracture
occurs if it doesn't entirely break us, though sometimes it
does?
But sometimes, the shattered vessel fills with light.
Sometimes, the fracture opens us.
Sometimes, we become not less but more alive,
like the discomfort of standing on a high ridge, soaked
in slicing gray rain, scoured by wind, bracing.
Perhaps the scouring can shed what
isn't needed, sloughing off the dead skin built up
over years of living, in fear of breaking,
our faces turned away.
'Throughout my whole life,' wrote Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, 'during every minute of it,
the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before
my eyes until it has come to surround me,
entirely lit up from within.'
This is a man who has known fracture.
We live steeped in its burning layers."