What the Body Knows

Alison Townsend

Rolling and dancing in mud, a child discovers an ecstasy of connection, a “moment of pure light/when I was the land…” So Townsend launches an exploration of “the truth of the body,” drawing clear lines of distinction between the liberating intuitions of the body elemental and the cramping coercions of the body social. Several poems are rooted in the nitty-gritty of familiar female experience with its perpetual “struggling to fit even/when the fit cinched me…” Through this voice, vivid with narrative detail and perception, we encounter girls embarking on sexual initiation and experimentation, young women shadowed by abuse, mature women mourning the failure of intimacy. A second voice, lighter and more lyrical, records the speaker’s insights (even revelations) as she begins to unlearn convention and invokes her own internal compass. “I am inviting back the one/who has been away,…/calling out to her,/the way a psychic calls her soul/back to her body,…/I am requesting that she teach me/to remember…/I call her home to me.” This newly trusted self deserves clothes from Victoria’s Secret, “no matter [that]…/I’ll never look like these women.” Her face “becomes more my own each day…” And sexuality and connection regain their promise. With a delicate grace of image and language, Townsend proposes: “If I called you river…/If you called me river…/If you were water entering water…/If the river knew anything more/than this sweet braiding and undoing of water,/that feeds everything/and yearns for everything and is,/in its rushing, everything the river can know.” Centering herself thus in what the body knows, Townsend finds homecoming.

Alison Townsend is the author of The Blue Dress (White Pine 2003). Her poems and essays have appeared in Calyx, Crazyhorse, Kalliope, New Letters, Nimrod, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Rattle, The Southern Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and many other journals. Her work has also been frequently anthologized, most recently in Are You Experienced?: Baby Boom Poets at Midlife, A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry, Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, The Greatness of Girls: Famous Women Talk About Growing Up, Women Runners: Stories of Transformation, Boomer Girls: Poems by Women of the Baby Boom Generation, and Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry. Her awards include the first place Sue Saniel Elkind prize from Kalliope in 1999, and residencies at Norcroft, Soapstone, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Colony. She teaches English, creative writing, and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, as well as In Our Own Voices, a private writing workshop for women. She lives in the farm country outside Madison, Wisconsin with her husband.

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Excerpt

Ring-O-Levio

Muggy summer evenings between supper and bed,
Bellewood Avenue hums with hordes of bored kids
waiting for darkness like something important,
our hands and faces sticky with ice cream
from the Good Humor Man or Bungalow Bar,
after which girls chant, Bungalow Bar tastes like tar!
The more you eat it, the sicker you are! laughing so hard
the Popsicles and Eskimo Pies rise back up in our throats.
The boys chuck jackknives, fart with their armpits,
dart in front of cars until we all begin to crackle and burn
with excitement, spitting sparks like a line of gunpowder dots

in a cap gun, and Bobby Michelle
-who greases his hair back like Ice in West Side Story–
and the Irish kid from the next street over
-who I know by his sweaty baseball jersey smell-
choose teams: You with the braids, you’re on my side.

Everything happens fast. The night sky glows
like the starry backdrop behind the school stage.
My team confetties through the neighborhood.
Kathy and I squish into her too-obvious storm cellar
and are dragged back screaming as prisoners
to her brother’s Davy Crockett fort
where Jay Dickey, the biggest bully on the block
but too fat to run fast, guards us like stolen gold.
Only someone from your own team can free you.
Or free me, as I huddle with Kathy
in the musty dark, snapping Blackjack gum
and waiting to be rescued

by the Irish kid, as it turns out,
who swoops down past the guard, gets
both feet into the den, and shouts Ring-o-levio!
Ring-o-levio! grabbing my hand so hard I wince
at how everything since seems the same process
of capture and release, the little doors
of the heart opening and closing
as abruptly as those of the fort
that is a cave that is childhood

that is the Irish kid telling me, You run good,
for a girl. I almost say well but don’t.
And already it is beginning,
though I am ten and he is twelve
and we do not know enough to touch;
we do not know enough to do anything
but crouch there together
in the prickly protection
of the blackberry bramble,
the calls of Caught! Caught! Caught!
echoing behind like the first,
small sounds of August rain sifting
through the branches around us.