SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fifteen
ALISON DUNHILL
Animal-Woman
Yes, you are naked,
but it's not for the human gaze.
You have clasped the drama from
l'Enfant Sauvage to your heart and...
you are the animal-woman.
Urgently you reach into the silent hole
in the far corner of the dilapidated room
to grasp the secret object, the mirror.
(You crouch and stretch and reach and lean.)
Your skin is dust and debris-flecked,
like the wall, for camouflage.
The intensity of your reach is held
in photographic aesthetic
as your body's curved diagonal softens
the rectangle of the room's corner.
Of course, you have constructed the scene,
set the timer and rushed, rushed, rushed
to put your image in position
in the frame; another tiny narrative
in your chain.
The room is smaller now;
these are cave walls with
long-dripped lichen-dropped ceilings.
Animal-woman, you crouch, you crouch,
you stretch and reach and lean,
clutching the important object, your talisman.
The mirror's presence is as unsettling
as an earthquake's tremor.
You investigate yourself. The first mirror. No vanity project this,
but the human infant's first sight of self, enacted.
You crouch and stretch and reach and lean.
You crawl away from
The eye that sees,
hold the mirror high, triumphant token;
human woman again.
You de-activate the mirror, its power,
by holding it close like a baby baboon.
Author's note:
This poem is a response to US photographer Francesca Woodman's
image sequence Self Deceit, 1978.
Alison Dunhill lives in Norfolk, England. A visual artist and an art historian, she has had poems published in Joe Soap's Canoe, Propel, SurVision, The Fenland Poetry Journal, and in Contemporary Surrealist and Magic Realist Poetry anthology (ed. by Jonas Zdanys, Lamar University Press, 2022) and Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry anthology (ed. by Tony Kitt; SurVision Books, 2023), and is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review. Her first poetry pamphlet, Gig Soup Scoop, was published by Trans Gravity Advertiser in 1972. Her second chapbook, As Pure as Coal Dust, won the James Tate Prize and was published by SurVision Books in 2021.
