SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Thirteen
ALISON DUNHILL
On the Wing
Beard of stars, star-beard, Barbastelle,
a little white beard distinguishes you
from Pipistrelle and Daubenton and Serotine.
It sprouts under your face's dark brown fur.
This face is a corbel to fend off evil spirits
from the west portal of Chartres. An ageing ET
with a tiny, squashed nose, black, round, shiny eyes and
enormous white-edged ears, needed for echolocation, your
tracking of insect night life.
This combination of fur and wing disturbs like surrealism.
Your tessellated wings in outstretch are so fine
they must have inspired Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome,
(or at least the umbrella). And yes, you are a quadruped:
your front and back stump-limbs elongate elegantly
into two rapturous wings, huge, when compared to your
kind-of- cosy furred body. The three angled divisions of each wing
are surfaced in honeycomb mottling. You are the only mammal to fly.
This is, after all, a miracle.
River
Milk blue scrolls of waves
unfurl through surface eddies
and continue their current
in crucible whirlpools.
White water swells blue
in a violin neck curling.
Near the sea of reeds,
a white heron high-steps
on the black mud bank,
as cormorants arrow
the river's exact horizontal.
Seagulls white-stud the banks
before their slopes slip.
Sand banks shine sun,
sorrel surrounds land pools
that swell in the water's overlapping.
The Mammoth and the Stag
I passed over white mountains
I am alone in a house
don't let your creature go
to chocolate brown and grey London
don't let your creature go
I swerved with grace
over white pointed mountains
back to a land I'd forgotten to have missed
I passed coolly several ranges
of white mountains
only to hear the bells of before
ringing and grinding their dissonances
don't let your creature go
I watched them accepting me
with customary affection and more
don't let your creature go
I glanced them all the glances
that you had taught me
and only one remembered
enough to hail my uncanny salute
I passed over white mountains
towards the slow terror of absent embraces
mindlessly I kindled fires for you
forgetting how tears streak a face
I would have climbed over white mountains
for you
I passed over white mountains with you
seeing you circling and waving
gliding and crying there
I circled crazy white mountains away from you
imagined you sitting
your Mammoth hooves damp and dripping
your white hairs growing
your hoof bones and your tears slipping
your oceans of thunder slanting
don't let your creature go
let the Stag grow.
Alison Dunhill lives in Norfolk, England. She is a visual artist and an art historian. She has published a collection titled Gig Soup Scoop (Transgravity Advertiser, London, 1972) and was an Arvon mentee in 1991, leading to publication in Joe Soap's Canoe magazine. Her poems also appear in Contemporary Surrealist and Magic Realist Poetry anthology (ed. by Jonas Zdanys, Lamar University Press, 2022). Her chapbook As Pure as Coal Dust won James Tate Poetry Prize and was subsequently published by SurVision Books in 2021.
