What the Body Knows

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.