When Do I Write?
Dr. Christine M. Du Bois
Someone asked me when I write poetry. So I explained:
There are different kinds of forgetting.
Sometimes I know what thing I’ve forgotten. I see a face or a flower, and I know it’s the name of the face or flower that’s gone missing.
Other times I’ve forgotten something so completely that it’s nowhere in my consciousness—until someone’s small comment, or the chorus of a song, or a delectable aroma, abruptly brings it to my mind. And then I realize that in all the time between my originally knowing that thing and my suddenly remembering it, it was just too forgotten to be sensed. It had vanished; in my mind’s world, in that in-between time, it simply was not. So it could not scrape my soul.
But there’s another forgetting, one that does rasp against me. It’s a feeling that I’ve forgotten something, but I have no idea what thing went missing, or even what kind of thing went missing. I’m sure I’ve forgotten, and I feel an absence, and that absence-space aches, but I don’t know where to turn my mind. People speak of free-floating anxiety; do they recognize free-floating forgetting—an ineffable, unanchored longing? It’s an unrelentingly liminal forgetting: something is too forgotten for a useful search for answers, yet not forgotten enough to be erased.
Is it what the Germans call sehnsucht, the inconsolable yearning for completeness? Sometimes I think of it this way, that once I was a warm brown berry cradled in the whiteness of a glowing woman’s moonlight hand. She smiled tenderly at me, utterly delighted. She was me, and I was her, and we were warm and brown and comforted and tender and white and cool and sparkling-gleaming all at once.
Then I forgot that feeling, that place, that completeness, even as I still long and long for it without words.
Yet sometimes, when I’m lucky, I feel a white shadow, and there’s a whisper of real remembering.
That’s when I write.
Dr. Christine M. Du Bois is a cultural anthropologist with books on immigration and race relations, and on how humans use soybeans, including soy agriculture’s human rights and environmental impacts. She has had poems published at BourgeonOnline.com, the blog of Prospectus magazine, PonderSavant.com, the CAW Anthology, Pif Magazine, Central Texas Writers and Beyond 2021, Open Door Magazine, Tell Tale Inklings, Valiant Scribe’s Vultures & Doves, Words for the Earth – A Poetry Project of the Red Penguin Press, the BeZine, Visitant literary magazine, Last Leaves magazine, and The Dope Fiend Daily. Poems are forthcoming in Psychological Perspectives, the Canary Literary Magazine, and in two anthologies from the Ravens Quoth Press. She has had a short story published in the Ecstasy issue of Libretto Magazine. In addition, she has edited publications on global efforts to reduce violence against women and girls, and she cares almost daily for a relative with severe dementia. An avid birdwatcher and eco-volunteer, she’s also a precinct Judge of Elections near Philadelphia.
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