Painblank

^{Pain—has an Element of Blank—
                        —Emily Dickinson}

there is a herald a messenger a teacher’s aide
making proclamations 
about the ins and outs of the pupils’ bodies, the holes
the wounds, let’s quantify
the historical significance of your eczema
she says, waving lasers at my scaly elbows 
why use ordinary blood, she says, when you can use strange blood
why use blood in ordinary ways when you can use it in 
surprising ways!
when you can use blood in such a way that it makes you 
aware of just how weird and malleable
how goofy and ridiculous    how bizarre it is that our
bodies are made of the ugliest simplest things

************************************************

because in the end    the teacher’s aide says 
life is about words   you say a bunch of words 
and if you don’t like them you “cross them out” 
and say a bunch of new words
it’s kind of simple if you think about it (poetry!)
you use one kind of word
and not another
one kind of blood
and not another
one kind of blank
and not another 

************************************************

teacher’s aide sits us on the ground and “puts on her poetry hat” 
repeat after me 
“pain”, “blank”, “PAIN”, “BLANK”, “Pain?” “Blank?”
“painblankpainblankpainblank”
she makes us repeat the words until they are just sounds
“painblaaaaaankpainblaaaaaankpainblaaaaaank”
until they have no meaning anymore and then slowly she says
“Pain”…………………….”Blank”……………….”Pain”……………..”Blank”
she nurtures that pause so we can feel in our skin and bones how time is passing 
she commands us to think about the relationship between “P” and “B”
between “ain” and “lank” 
because whether you know it or not
she says
you will think about the relationship between pain and blank
between ain and lank    for the rest of your lives 

************************************************

“painblank,” she says
“painblank painblank painblank”
the kids clap their hands, whooping 
“painblank! painblank! Painblank!”

************************************************

in unison we sing:
we have no future but ourselves
our infinite realms contain our past
all we will ever feel are
New Periods of Pain!  

Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Borzutzky. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I have said Emily Dickinson’s line ‘Pain has an element of blank’ in my head thousands of times…. I don’t know how many times I have tried to make sense of something only to conclude that the best poetic solution available is to say that it’s blank—the blank in the blank of my blank, the blankest of times, the blankness into which we all digress. Perhaps the thing about Dickinson’s poem is the way in which pain is enveloped so completely by, well, pain itself. But also, the problem of pain’s untranslatability, its blankness, resides in the sounds and symmetry of the words. What I’m suggesting in this translation of Dickinson’s Pain-Blank relationship is a reading and writing practice that believes in two things: that repetition is never repetition and that poetry, like pain and blankness, resides in the body. Perhaps poetry has the ability—definitely for the writer and perhaps for the reader—to assimilate into the body, to become inseparable from it, to become a language that is ingested through sonic relationships that have an effect beyond time, logic, and comprehension.”
—Daniel Borzutzky