I see in them, faces
stacked on faces
~
Kneeling, hard limestone
the tower of masks
wears concern
and surveillance
in tribute and desire
they cannot
touch themselves
anxiety around
self-promotion
the worthless old
sits in the darkness.
To lay down
and be lovestruck
out of nowhere
and then to be
carved in stone
and to never take
your arms away
from your face
to never take
your arms to
someone’s face
that is a gift.
Indecent, the length
of the shadow
of the aqueduct
so dark it nightly
turns the forest blue
Prairie Burning
There is a man
who circles the perimeter
with a baby in his arms
unmoving.
Locusts burn
with the silhouettes
of saints at dusk.
Saints are in the cloud.
We are in a dry storm.
The man extends his circles
pulling the baby through
the cactus scrub.
Look at his melting trainers
in the heat
they aren’t what he asked for.
There are black leather skids
on the dry-stone wall.
People in black cloaks run
out of the corner of your eye.
A hog turns on a spit.
The prairie is a terrarium for the blaze
but the edge is dry of fire.
It is the height of one season,
bushes burn.
A burnt five-year-old
without eyelids
turns quick cartwheels
through the heat wave
under the big pale sky,
black and blue.
The Slim Man
A landscape unpainted:
a cold stream of lean black weeds
leading towards a stile
and a field tilting up.
Trees turn to veins against marbly sky
in the half hour before night.
During a certain moon
children are said to have seen
a slim man walking over the field
in a low mist, towards the stile,
leading a girl
in pale blue pinstripes
into the glowing pinstripe forest beyond.
Sometimes he will stop and lean down,
and scrape the earth,
then earth and touch are knotted
for they are both cold.
No one is scared of him,
more of the thick-dark brook, drowned roots
and full night, the pitiful rabbits’
eyes yellow on the hillside.
Multiflora
Was held stationary on the aqueduct
near the snakeskin hanging from the bridge
thrown up by kids. And on the other side of the ridge
a collision of wasps from somewhere in the growth.
Swimming upstream, insects parch my body.
The day is an oven. I float outwards
in a concentric circle. I will know the pattern of your knee.
I sit by the river and envisage our children.
My ankles give way to other thoughts,
thoughts about stealing, objectify me.
She emerges, caught
in a decision
makes her way upwards
in an initial period of
waiting. She wears
suffering on her head
like sugar on a cake.
Time isn’t real.
What weather outside?
Worms of mould
in the fruit. Spools
of dirt in the grooves
of the hair. Half-light,
full light, one beacon
pierces the same time
as the sun rises, and
shows up sweet scum
on the water’s surface
dappled like albumen.
I rescue a hazy insect,
she watches and knows
I have secrets.
I fall backwards into
the fiume, wearing a
chalk coat, and a heart-skip.
What will save me.
I tell her I love them all,
but she can’t tell me hers.
Landscape for a Dead Woman
To be beautiful
and powerful enough
for someone
to want to break me
up
into syndicated ripples.
Later I’ll try
to rise from these dead.
laid out on
a shrine
a bloodletting woman
take her to
the sea
fog stuffed
where mayhem
in the slew
of interlocking
waters clarifies
into a vision; a handprint
becomes colloidal
and then she’s gone
this is what happens
when a woman dies
the landscape
unlocks from its planning
we are reluctant tenants
no one else lives here
we farmed all the grief
murder is a kind of sorcery
who cursed us?
Can we blame the alignment
of inexplicable circumstances
or was it my fault?
I ask as I’m pushed back into the dark
my mouth a spell of light
what’s going on out there
the sinking house and the land
are to be consumed
and the sea will obfuscate the shore as she has
obfuscate our lives
murder is
future embarrassment
mother and sister, qualities
calcify in the density of bones
where is she
when she’s not with me?
Not back in the old stone kitchen
prone on a cold wood floor
when the water’s grey and tactile
I could lift it up like a blanket
and find her hiding underneath
crouched down like a joke
I didn’t earn any adulthood
I had it thrust upon me
she visited once
and told me
men have the upper hand
unbanded her chest
to reveal rows of wounds
delivered concomitantly
my vision
is scalded and empty
sweet, insignificant
chatter in the distance
a bad husband loitering
in the kitchen of my mind: damp
he lives in shadow
damp, I cannot place his face
was she alive
when she lived? Did she wear
hooves on her feet?
Did he mistake her for an animal
when he let blood for the night?
She is embedded in the walls
and emerges from the walls
our memories need flushing
like a cistern blocked with blood
I bundle my sister
up in the cloth
deliver her to the
orphanage
where she will be safer away
from her murderous family
where they murder
each other in kitchens
great screaming
certain areas of council do nothing
I thought I saw her
and followed her through the stre
ets
it wasn’t her of course
I would have done more than that
I would have brought her back to life
colossal guilt
the size of buses end to end
the size of blue whales spilling from wounds
a picture book of primary colours
featuring increments of size
mean I imagine wounds
not celebratory hands
that touch the children’s cake
we keep it from them
my sister in the mist
tugging bones
where the grass dies
murder is a flood
has she gone into liquidation?
When the ice melts will she be there
with a plague
to give to everyone
she has dissolved
an egg in acid
I sit by the lake
with a rod
to wait for her
to come out of the water
and a novelty postcard arrives
from wherever she is
ghosts war in my head
cryptic and mildew
counting all the dead women
putting them in a document
burn all documents
rescue the women
pulling their hair out
she told the operator
she couldn’t breathe
and out to sea, blue breath
a blue ghost on the doorstep
but it’s not her
she is wholly gone
birds hang like visual disturbance
flick monstrously from side to side
bad pile of sand
no end and no beginning
water laps at my feet
Apostles Burning
I was one burnt daughter
in a genealogy.
Stepped into the oil
spill like a siren
backed with the wings
of a tanker’s logo
jangling stranded
in the outer ocean
holding a child
looking for the perfect
swell. Fires edging closer
like dinghies on water.
Apostles hot and orange,
citrus milk I can feed her.
Banshee
He’ll sit by the window
at an innocent date
with wandering hands
over a port-green stool.
There’s the kitchen
where she was murdered
where she was delivered
into a weapon with force
like a small model forester
axing up plastic logs
in a red wooden clock
murdered by a man
the sanctity of communion
she was never alone
the heavy smell of blood
misted up past the crockery
and the murdered girls before her
gathered up in plain cotton
the scores of her limbs
and the nub of her treatment
her hair was a clotted
pattern of wallpaper
like a tapestry of rabbits
and they left with her body
but do not forgive
so easily as that.
Tonight she laughs walking
towards his dark house
her head’s a dun lantern
with split ends uplifted
her hands are barbed knots
to take it back
for she’s fury with a shell
and she’s petty.
The old boundary walls
where she leaned in the summer
swaying in her peripherals.
She dons now a grey sheet
the dusk colour of bonbons
too seem more like a haunting
light pools through the mock-glass
and the door she approaches
the red door approaches
The sea flames
an undercurrent.
A girl, strange beliefs
present in the water
turns through plastic
holds to the drift
bathing in the black and
emergent pond.
Lungless, she
caves with the weight
see the water’s charge
boil simultaneously
as the girls float up
to the billowing ceiling.
About the Author
Rachael Allen was born in Cornwall and studied at Goldsmiths College. She is the co-author of Jolene, a book of poems and photographs with Guy Gormley, and Nights of Poor Sleep, a book of poems and paintings with Marie Jacotey. She has received a Northern Writers’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award, and was made a Faber New Poet in 2014. She is poetry editor at Granta and co-founder of the poetry press clinic and online journal tender.
Copyright
First published in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
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74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Rachael Allen, 2019
The right of Rachael Allen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–34112–2