“The Hole”: Poetry Like a Gunshot Wound

The medical world teaches clinicians to observe a certain silence. Through diagnosis, they label suffering as contusions, lacerations, and hemorrhages, as if naming the pain could confine it, preventing it from spilling into their personal lives. Operating rooms and wards are surprisingly skilled at this art of suppression. However, the visibly injured body yearns for poetry.

It is at this junction, where medical measurements diverge from human experiences, that poetry becomes an essential need, not an embellishment. In "The Hole," poetry does not resolve the rift or mend the gunshot wound, which is part of an epidemic of violence. Instead, it delves into the inexpressible, not by converting it into medical jargon but by showcasing the brutality that resists such translation.

The wound is portrayed from various angles: artistically ("Picasso"), nostalgically ("meatballs," "cherry jam"), and clinically ("patch," "excavate," "evaluate"). Yet, all descriptions fall short, and in this inadequacy, a peculiar yet enduring closeness emerges. The poem’s core lines, "This hole was vast./It was no bigger than an eye," encapsulate profound trauma without explaining it, as if the poem is bleeding alongside it.

The poem’s gut-wrenching closing lines, "It wouldn’t be filled by dreams/or poetry, my hands or gauze.//It would weep a lifetime/onto the table," force clinicians to confront such encounters through detachment, yet poetry compels us to be injured by them—bloodied and awestruck.