Alison Townsend

BLUE WILLOW: PERSEPHONE FALLING

                                 “Depression is hidden knowledge.”
                                 —James Hillman

You think it will never happen again.
Then one day in November it does, the narrow,
dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through
twenty years before cracking apart, a black grin
opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out
to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you.
That sound’s back in your head again—
like angry bees or static or rubber bands
breaking. And beneath it a distant hum
you remember being scared was voices
till the doctor explained it was your own brain,
working overtime to understand its disordered signals.

And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours—
from the African country where 30% of the childbearing
women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother
who sells her great-grandmother’s Blue Willow china
for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own
mother, who dies again every autumn, something
wrong when she didn’t come home for Thanksgiving
the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins
you’d embroidered—“M” for “Mommy”—with ordinary
thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy’s
blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing
you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,

whether you want to or not. Though that’s not
what you’re thinking as you hurtle
through the night, jittery as the rabbit
you swerve to avoid, your head filled
with chattering fog, a glass door sliding shut
between you and the world, that feeling of being
outside yourself so loud you don’t seem real.
Though you are. As you maneuver the car carefully
through the dark, remembering how you willed
yourself to live this way for two years,
synapses flashing like emergency lights
you thought you’d never see again.

But here they are, the medication you’ve ratcheted
down for a year necessary after all, the biochemical
net too small, the darkness you’ve pushed away
for twenty years with what your doctor calls
one hand tied behind you suddenly back.
As you remember setting out your mother’s
Blue Willow on the table every night
as a child—blue people in blue houses
under blue trees—each plate a story you can
walk into, where everything is fine. If it weren’t
so dark inside and you weren’t so scared.
If you could only think how to get there, and what
treasure you are supposed to find when you do.

–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

Alison Townsend

PERSEPHONE REMEMBERS: THE BED

It happens in the dark.
If it was light would she be able to stand it?
Her father’s bed a cave she crawls into
when she wakes, forgetting, then remembering,
the scab sleep weaves over the raw place torn open.

The bed, the bed, something that happened in the bed.

Her mother is dead
and everything green has been folded away,
like the flower-sprigged eiderdown in the closet
where she buried her face to remember summer
and the scent of her mother’s live body.

The bed, something happened in the bed,

and the bear she once pretended to be—
those times she touched herself where no one had before—
has gotten inside her father’s body, touching
where she touched, and it is wrong then
gone between her fingers and

the bed, the bed. Something that happened,

something that wakes her after she has fallen
a long way through darkness, someone
who shakes her, says to get up and return
to her own bed, it is morning now, “our secret,”
she must not tell her brother and sister.

The bed, something in the bed,
where her mother taught her to make
hospital corners, where she tucks
and folds the blank spaces into rhymes,
counting the beats between each breath,
bed and head, bed and red, bed and dead.

The bed, the bed, something happened and her mother

is dead and there is no one between
the girl and the sparks of their father’s
sadness, loss a bright red wound he circles
like a bear before sleep, the cave walls
flickering with the prints of hands.

The bed, the bed, it is

her own bed then, carved posts
and pineapple finials, the mattress
imprinted with the shape of her body,
and she is a feather, light in her father’s arms.
Though what she remembers is a dream

the bed, the bed, girl moving like a ghost,
walking, just a glimpse of something
that happened to the girl dreaming
in green cotton pajamas she is that girl
in the bed with her father then

back in her own bed again, where the pictures
run together into something wet on her leg,
the bed and the bear and what happened?
It blurs, it is red, and she is her mother,
which must mean she is dead, too.

Though sun shines through white lace
across her window, though her brother
and sister sigh and stir, though she tastes
the dirt from which each green word springs,
bitter as medicine at the back of her mouth.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007