#22: And Still the Music
About the Author
Alison Townsend is the author of two previous collections of poetry, The Blue Dress and What the Body Knows. Her poetry and creative nonfiction appear widely, in journals such as Arts & Letters, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, MARGIE, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southern Review, andin anthologies such as Best American Poetry 2006, A Fierce Brightness, Flash Fiction Forward, Kiss Me Goodnight, and Boomer Girls. She has won many awards, including a literary fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts, Soapstone, Norcroft, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Colony. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives with her husband on four acres of prairie and oak savanna in the farm country outside Madison.
About the Chapbook
"Open to any page of this book and you'll find a little miracle-in-progress—an apparition in sidewalk chalk, a re-animation of myth, a new spin on an old tune. In Alison Townsend's poems, all of the lost ones come home, in one form or another, to remind us that "everything repeats, and we watch it." And Still the Music is a brave and expansive collection; each of its beautifully crafted poems is bound to spark an instant recognition or trip a deeply hidden nerve. Yet in response to every old grief, Townsend offers another marvel, another song set to the steady beat of hope.” —Pamela Gemin, author of Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers, and editor of Boomer Girls: Poems by Women of the Baby Boom Generation
"I was immediately engaged by the arresting voice, the rush of vivid language, the integrity of this collection. These poems are fully realized, nothing tentative or unfinished about them. They triumph, even in the face of violence and loss." —Carole Simmons Oles, author of Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer
“These are expansive poems, as generous in scope as Walt Whitman's and as intimately particular as Eavan Boland's. Townsend deftly weaves contemporary story and ancient myth into a brilliantly-hued tapestry that illuminates our lives.” —Judith Sornberger, author of Open Heart
From the Chapbook
And Still the Music
(in memory of Josie Avery, 1953–2003)
One month after your death,
and I'm doing my every-other-day-when-I-don't-run workout
at Curves for Women—Stoughton, Wisconsin's
equivalent of a gym—where I've already
won a "Curves buck" for guessing tonight's
trivia question, and the big news
is that the local Wal-Mart won the best
"hometown store" award, and the ladies—
as they call us here—are sweating and panting
their way through the circle of machines
when "Great Balls of Fire" comes on
and damn if you aren't right there before me,
the slit between worlds opening and closing
like an elevator door as I hustle
from the pec-deck to the recovery pad,
and for just a second, for a breathless,
high-stepping, hip-swaying, triple beat
second, I see you, dressed in that vintage
purple lace you wore to a dance in college
thirty years ago, waving a rhinestone
cigarette holder, your arms open, your mouth
red and alive, startling me so I almost stop,
until I see that if I hesitate, you fade
and that to keep you here I have
to keep moving because you never
sat any dance out; and so I do,
powering my way through the leg press,
the oblique twist and the knee squat,
until my muscles burn, moving my arms
in and out, up and down, running non-stop
on the pads, singing under my breath
with the music, which somehow becomes
"R-E-S-P-E-C-T" and then "Great Balls of Fire"
again, and every good dance song that dumb band
called Widespread Depression played, the sweat
pouring down my face as I dance with you
in this room full of middle-aged women
trying to stop time or at least hold it at bay,
and who wouldn't cry? as I dance with you,
as if my good heart and lungs could somehow
bring you back—breathing life into you the way
the heart-and-lung machine could not—in this room
where you both are and are not, and the music
keeps going, and I remember you twirling once
at a dance and saying, I'm happy, so happy, as if
you could have died then—and still the music
carries us, and tears splash down my arm
for the girls we were together and the women we became,
for the empty place on every dance floor without you.
