Blood Elegy: Persephone at Midlife

Blood Elegy:Persephone at Midlife Alison Townsend (bio) (On reading that the rind of the pomegranate is high in estrogen) Always she has eaten of it.Always, though a friendinforms her that the rind is bitter,she has taken it between her teeth,chewing it the way Inuit womenchew sealskin to make somethingso soft it can be wrappedaround every secret known by the body.She has licked it and gummed it,taking each scarlet scrapand stitching it to anotheruntil she had a red dress,though red was neverher natural color, though herestrogen level sputters and falls,inevitable as the gas gauge going downin a car where she finds herselfheaded straight into a blizzard,too many miles behind to turn back now,the road ahead a blank page,a tundra whiteout, her own facevanishing beneath a continent of years. Still she moves, forward motionthe only possible elegyfor all the blood she has shed,for what ticks through the slow,red clock of the body, snow whisperingagainst the windshield of a carone only drives alone, the bodydreaming itself into red— [End Page 21] wolf, salmon, fox, eventhe cardinals of her childhood,erupting in a ring of flamearound the outstretchedpalm of her mitten. She put her hands outto the fire-colored birdsas if they could warm her.She puts her hands out to them now,though there is no one but herselfto see the tree in each palm,its bare branches maps of a countrywhere the soul must always land. Snow falls in great sheets inside her body.The red dress shimmers and clings, brightas the blood-stained hands of Inuit women,the satin lining beneath eachmortal curve and cleft of herstill believing itselfmistress and queen. Though the flesh continues itsslow fall away from the fruit of body.Though she leaves the car and walksfor a long way into the dark.Though the fans of wrinkles opena little farther around her eyes each day,directing her fierce, blue gazetoward the moment when she is nearly bone,her every surface scrimshawed, engraved by time,the red dress her life was nothingbut scraps of bitter skin. Why does it take half a lifeto learn red and the shape of this wildness? [End Page 22] To become this tough, sinewy meatthat lopes alone toward the end,refusing to lie down anywherenear my fire and find comfort. [End Page 23] Alison Townsend Alison Townsend has published three collections of poetry: The Blue Dress (White Pine), What the Body Knows (Parallel P), and And Still the Music (Flume P Chapbook Prize winner). Her newest collection, Persephone in America, won the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2009. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the farm country outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press

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