Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Alison Townsend
Unexpected Harvest
Jefferson County resident Jim Reu found an unusual item
while combining his field recently: a wedding gown, likely from
the August 15 th tornado that hit Stoughton [Wisconsin]....The
wedding gown is muddy and has a few tears in it, but Reu is
hoping it can be returned to its owner.
—Stoughton Courier-Hub, November 3, 2005
Of course it’s from the tornado.
That’s what we want to believe, as much
as we hope the photograph will help the dress
find its way back to the woman it belongs to.
But as the fields around town hum, rumbling
with the sound of combines harvesting the last
soybeans and corn, trucks piled high with beds
of tumbled gold, it’s hard not to think it might
be Persephone’s, dropped or torn off as someone
whose face she couldn’t see dragged her under,
the lacy overdress ripping, its medallion pattern—
visible where the farmer and his son hold it up
in the photo—printed with mud
where he pushed her down, dark in her eyes,
dark in her mouth, dark the earth
that entered her body. Hard not to think
she might have been out there, walking
the green fields when the whirlwind hit,
her body slender as an ear of corn,
braid like a tassel coming undone.
And innocent too, girl trying on her mother’s
wedding dress without knowing what it means,
marriage a cave lit by fires that burn bright
then dark, so close together it’s sometimes
hard to tell the difference, or understand
why joy cradles sadness in its palm, dropping it
into the ground that it may sprout from blackness.
190 ◆ Crab Orchard Review