Ann Townsend

Ann Townsend was born in 1962 in Pittsburgh, attended Denison University, and received her MA and PhD from Ohio State University. Her poetry, fiction, and criticism regularly appear in such journals as AGNI, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Witness. Townsend’s two books are Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998) and The Coronary Garden (Sarabande, 2005). Her work has been recognized with the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the James Dickey Prize in Poetry, an NEA Fellowship, and other honors. Townsend, a gardener and trained vocalist, has taught at Denison University since 1992. She lives with her husband, the poet David Baker, and their daughter Kate on a small farm in Granville, Ohio.

They Call You Moody

Such proneness to sadness, such little fits

of life-grinding-to-a-halt:

today three diet cokes can’t erase

the jack-pine limbs that dance maniacally

outside the window. All the world’s

a pathetic fallacy where willows weep

and the two crows striding across the turf

freeze-frame into death’s heads

with every snap of the camera’s

imaginary stutter. Ha ha ha they caw

and carried on the updraft they soar and dip

against the sky’s umbrella. Oh chemicals rich

in the blood, oh minor turbulent despair,

the sky unfolds, rinsed with bluing,

the crocuses snap open on their crazy

hinges. I hear it all, even through glass,

the loosening, the ticks, the groan.

Touch Me Not

“Rembrandt went to extraordinary lengths to fix the

precise tone and bluish pallor of dead flesh….”

—Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes

They took my glasses and laid them

on a table. They took what rings

I wore. They raised my arm

above my head and I rocked against a pillow

that smelled sweet, like anesthesia,

like meat. I hoped to stay awake

for the operation, to see my thumb

flayed and spread apart

on the table, and pieced back together.

My arm was pinned and held

and treated kindly, rinsed and dried

and spoken to like a fearful dog.

That spring my father’s hand in its death

looked like a claw, unhappily white,

and if I thought I saw a tremor,

a border flexing, it was just a shadow

resting on his finger’s underside

and not his dumb hand beckoning to me.

I must have been crying by then.

His instrument raised the flexor tendons

from my wrist, and with swing music

in the background, the Vercet-induced

vapor and bright lights, I dreamed

“The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp”

as seen from below, from the dead man’s

view, until finally my flayed hand and wrist

resembled a stringed instrument,

a tiny mandolin, tendons and ligaments

glistening in their residency.

For months before, chill air

surrounded my fingers like a traveling halo,

those I embraced flinched and said

touch me not. A marvel,

a magician’s trick, a whiteness so dead cold

the doctor’s temperature strip failed to register

at all. My love called me little ice cube.

My love opened jars for me

and brushed my teeth.

I wanted to reach in and I did,

to his thumb, flushed with embalming fluid.

I measured my own against it,

and like a paradox of motion and stillness,

Achilles running fast, and faster, going nowhere,

I floated my pulse upon silence

despite his pallor, every line of paint that brought him

forward, despite the unconstructed, awful hands

formed around a block, and pinned there.

Modern Love

The rain streams past the gutters, overflowing

a drain clogged with leaves. From inside

the sound is cool and precise, and though

the door lies open and the light

spills out, the kitchen keeps its warmth.

The refrigerator hums, the girl works on

beneath the pools of light, and the man

outside her window sees her pull

on a cigarette; his eyes follow

the orange-bright tip; he flicks water

from his eyes and wonders what to do next,

how to proceed, whether to use the knife

or his hands to open the latched screen door.

He has never been so wet.

She studies the list on the table, decorum

of crossed-out items—the few that remain.

The rain slows, and the last crickets begin

a feeble song from the pond next door.

So far away, each thinks. He watches her mouth open

in concentration. He must make her

hear him as he meant to be heard:

what they have done has not been wrong.

His hands know their way past the buttons of her dress.

She lifts her eyes to the window and catches

sight of her own likeness in the glass.

She can never stop herself: smiling

at the ghost reflection before her.

He believes she is looking at him.