Her body is like one of those stretchy balloons. That’s why she’s a regular in the park on a Saturday afternoon, among the guys beating on bongos, the dog-walkers and the chess players. And let’s not forget the mimes. Or the ancient folk singer with his white beard and beat-up guitar. Only she’s into folding herself into shapes First up. she’s a ribbon. Then a pretzel. Then a cat’s cradle.
She tells me she’s double-jointed, maybe triple, as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. On cue, she twists herself into a living sculpture. Maybe she hopes a museum might come calling.
When she was younger, her friends couldn’t get enough of the show she put on for them. “Be a butterfly,” they’d shout, or “Be a rocking chair.” And she would, obligingly, because what else do you do at thirteen.
But now, her friends have scattered. And all she has is her tricks. She folds herself up again - a ball of string, a knot of nerves, her insides tightening in sympathy with her ligaments. She confesses that she’s getting too old for this. And maybe she is. But she is also too old for what she isn’t, which is a person who knows how to relax.
She has never learned the art of unfolding. She can’t just let the body be a body. And I want to tell her it’s fine, that everyone is contorted in their own way. Some just hide it better. But I can’t get her attention. She’s already bent in half again.
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
The arc is clean and it is chronological: the park, then thirteen, then now, then the failed approach. Nothing is out of order and nothing is hurried.
The catalogue of shapes is the best-built thing here, because it changes character halfway through and the poem does not stop to point at it. The early shapes are chosen and made: a ribbon, a pretzel, a cat’s cradle — and cat’s cradle is the sharpest of the three, since it is a figure that only exists in somebody else’s hands. Then, in the fourth stanza, the same device returns as a ball of string, a knot of nerves, and the poem crosses from external shape to internal state inside a single line, without announcing the crossing. The line after it does the same thing again — her insides tightening in sympathy with her ligaments — putting the physical and the emotional in one clause and declining to explain which is the metaphor. That is the poem’s finest passage and it is four lines long.
Two places where I would push. The opening stanza spends eight of its eleven lines on the park — bongos, dog-walkers, chess players, mimes, the folk singer with his beat-up guitar — before the subject arrives. The details are good and they are doing atmosphere rather than work; the poem’s actual business begins at Only she’s into folding herself into shapes. And the last line, She’s already bent in half again, is the button the whole piece has been arranging, which is both its virtue and its problem: it lands exactly where a reader will have predicted from the title. Everything before it has been more surprising than that.
I should record my stop first. I went looking for the apparatus — who licenses the park, whether this is busking or recreation, whether she is paid, what happens to a street performer’s body as a working asset — and the poem does not go there. The contortion stays personal and somatic throughout. That is a legitimate choice and not the poem’s failure to be a different poem, so having noted it I moved on.
What I do want to map is the poem’s own position, because its structure is a diagnosis delivered by someone with no access to the patient. Track the two moments she speaks for herself. The first: She tells me she’s double-jointed, maybe triple, / as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. She offers an account of herself and the poem overrules it in half a line. The second: She confesses that she’s getting too old for this. She makes a plain statement; the verb reclassifies it as an admission of something she ought to be ashamed of. Both times she speaks, and both times the speaker re-files what she said.
I would press hardest on the first, because it is the poem’s weakest sentence and it is also the most fixable. Double-jointedness does explain it. It is a physical fact about a body and a complete answer to the question how can she do that. What it does not explain is why she keeps doing it, in public, at an age when it has started to cost her — and that is the question the poem actually wants to ask. Dismissing a true answer to a question you were not asking makes the speaker sound less curious than the rest of the poem shows him to be.
Then comes the part I admire, and I am genuinely unsure whether it is designed. The poem’s most confident sentence is its most presumptuous — she is also too old for what she isn’t, / which is a person who knows how to relax — a complete verdict on an interior life, issued from a park bench. And then the poem refuses to let him deliver any of it. But I can’t get her attention. The diagnosis is assembled in full and never handed over. Whether that ending is irony or accident, it is the truest thing in the piece: a man holding a finished theory of a woman, with no way to reach her.
The presence in this poem is an audience that has gone home. “Be a butterfly,” they’d shout, / or “Be a rocking chair.” Those are imperatives. Every shape she made at thirteen was ordered by somebody else, and the poem is exact about her compliance — And she would, obligingly, / because what else do you do at thirteen. The friends have scattered; the instruction has not. She is still filling orders placed by people who left.
The word that gives it away is tricks. All she has is her tricks. A trick is not a thing you can do alone — the noun requires a spectator to complete it. Whatever else she has, the poem tells us she has only the part that needs an audience, and the audience is now one man on a bench who cannot get her attention.
One thing I noticed that sits outside this poem, and I raise it because it seems to me a preoccupation rather than a coincidence. This is the second of three pieces by this writer in the volume, and each of them stations its speaker just outside the event that matters. In I Remember That Fire he misses the fire and is left imagining it. Here he arrives at a complete understanding of a woman and cannot deliver a word of it. A man at the edge of something he cannot enter, narrating it anyway, and honest about the fact that he is doing so. That is a real subject, and it may be closer to the centre of this writer’s work than either poem’s ostensible topic. My colleague takes it up again at the third.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The knot of nerves
Woman in a Twist enters the Archive as a portrait: thirty-six lines watching a contortionist in a park on a Saturday, and reasoning backwards from her body to her life.
The myth it exposes is one that attaches to anybody unusual performing in public: that a rare physical gift on display is an expression of joy. The poem declines that reading and proposes the opposite — that the show began as compliance, at thirteen, on the instructions of friends, and hardened into something she now cannot stop doing at an age when it hurts. All she has is her tricks is the flat centre of the argument.
Beneath it runs the myth the poem itself rests on, and it is the more interesting of the two: the empathetic observer — that a man watching from a bench can read a stranger’s interior more accurately than she reads it herself. Every psychological claim in this poem is unverified. She said she was double-jointed; the speaker said that explains nothing. She said she was getting too old for this; the speaker said she was also too old for what she isn’t. The record simply notes that the poem’s diagnoses are the speaker’s, and that the poem ends by making them undeliverable.
Its symbols are all made shapes, and they change owner partway through: the ribbon and the pretzel (things she chooses to become), the cat’s cradle (a figure that only exists in someone else’s hands, which is the whole poem in one object), the park (a stage nobody booked, where the bongos and mimes and chess players establish that everyone present is performing something), and the knot of nerves — the point where the shape stops being made and starts being what she is. Its target is that knot: a body that has converted tension into permanent structure.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. It arrived legible, the readers agreed quickly, and our procedure did not have to change to take it in. Rung is not rank. What it leaves behind is a baseline for the observational character study — and one live question the archive is content to leave open, which is whether the poem knows that its last line is the sound of its own authority failing.
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