Stories Tell Themselves, They Don't Get Told

Unbidden
Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

•

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

•

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.

"Stories tell themselves, they don't get told. That much I know after a lifetime of working with stories. Never try to impose yourself. Wait for the story to speak for itself." - J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee's statement that stories tell themselves rather than are told is accurate. I've always felt that the words that flow from my fingers come unbidden, like the dead coming for one last conversation over drinks in my dreams. The stories come from some dark space locked up in the unconscious mind. I do think my ancestors must sit next to me and whisper their stories to me.

Close to fifteen years ago, when I finally got the courage to think I might want to write, I dreamed I entered a cave which lead to the Underworld. I was surrounded by the newly dead, so I had covered myself in a bearskin to hide that my flesh was alive. From a carved rock window in the tunnel, I saw the meeting hall where the dead gathered, (similar, but not as dark, and certainly not as dreary as the one portrayed in Gilgamesh), a stone wall rose to a high ceiling, in which notable dead rested in hollowed caves. While still in the tunnel, a large crow recognized me as its child and tried to feed me three large larvae, but I knew what happened to Persephone, so I didn't eat them. The most important and relevant (to this post) part of the dream was that I instinctively grabbed a skeleton's head between my hands and blew breath into its mouth. I was giving the dead my breath, much like the dead now offer thier stories.