Two Poems After Francesca Woodman, by Alison Dunhill

Treepiece

Well yes,
you love aspen,
its dry and bright flaky
bark surface peels to reveal
tender

snakeskin
new and silver –
silver celebrity
of the copse, white and leaning to
the left

with grace.
Untouched ‘til your
human intervention,
when you bracelet the bark before
it breaks

when you
insert your arms,
hands free, outside, to stretch
skywards in the wood, same angle,
tone right.

Your im-
age deceives our
eye to see you as a
tree, so exact your twinning and
its cam-

ouflage
that your elbow
becomes one tree knot, out
of seven hundred aspen in
our sight.

Apoll-
o cannot get
you now, though trembling as-
pen, not laurel, gives you such protect-
ive allure.

**

This poem was written in response to Untitled (McDowell Colony), by Francesca Woodman (USA) 1980.
https://woodmanfoundation.org/artworks/untitled-7

**

Bark and Dress

You’ve brushed
and plaited your
hair, parted it dead cen-
tre so its upward line reflects
the trees’

growth up.
Your bark bracelets
make you part of the wood,
as you reach for the sky in them.
Their tears

and holes –
are they prickly? –
echo the twig patterns
on your vintage dress. Yes, you are
Daphne now.

**

This poem was written after Untitled (McDowell Colony), by Francesca Woodman (USA) 1980
https://assets-global.website-files.com/5d8073c5ddf5281c25cdcc3e/62db2762b32a76dd08ec0035_M_476_CD.jpg

Alison Dunhill 

Alison Dunhill won the James Tate Prize in 2020 with her chapbook As Pure as Coal Dust. She has poems in the anthology Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (ed. Jonas Zdanys ) and in SurVision’s Anthology of Tangential Surrealist Poetry (ed. Tony Kitt), both published in 2023. She is also a visual artist and has exhibited frequently. An art historian too, her MPhil thesis makes links between interwar European surrealism and 1970s photography.