The Unmapped Woman

Abegail Morley

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781911027928
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This deeply moving new collection from Abegail Morley explores the altitudes of trauma, mapping the stark new territory that loss leaves behind, where the landmarks of absence overfill with memories, where the missing loom large, casting their unshifting shadow.

"In The Unmapped Woman Morley writes with astonishing technical virtuosity as she searches for recovery through art...Morley speaks in a voice that is eloquent and precise as she seeks to understand what happens to the vanished." - Nancy Gaffield

"Abegail Morley is a natural poet. Each poem seems exhaled in a single necessary breath as she unflinchingly addresses traumatic events. Her language is fresh, fluent and unadorned, with strikingly accurate images, and endings that make the reader re-consider the whole poem... This is a highly talented, original voice well worth listening to." – Patricia McCarthy

"These are poems to live with - tight as the skin of a drum." – Robert Peake

II

Playing fields

We come to look at the bones.

Your hand fumbles mine, palm sticky,

wax crayon-coated. He lures us somehow,

leads us to the field’s edge, pokes with a stick, shouts:

See there. No there. We search the earth

to see the dead man’s corpse, how his skull

leaks worms, larvae burrow in sockets,

beetles, black as currants, shuttle themselves

click-clicking over shins and elbows.

He spits in his palm, makes me spit in mine,

then shake. I drop yours to do it. It’s the hottest

day of the holidays – you shiver,

chapped bottom lip hanging like a gash.

You stuff in your thumb.

I smell the barley; hear it crack in the heat.

Cutting ties

Time, he says, is just a line

from beginning to end,

a sheared strand of string

dangling limply from

an outstretched hand.

I try to tell him that string

runs from end to end

and has no beginning, but

now he speaks of knots

and journeys and how

we unravel ourselves from

each other. I’m threadbare,

as if I’ve plucked holes

in myself since my beginnings

looped. He is whole; yards

of twine spool from him,

reminds me of a biology class,

a gash of intestines, scalpel ‒

no start or finish line.

It doesn’t matter how carefully

you pick or unpick time,

you bruise yourself to the crypt

of your bones, orphan emotions

from your core so they unpack

themselves minute by minute

in some place you’d never

willingly go, but go tonight.

Maybe I shouldn’t carry

scissors or a knife in my bag.

Maybe I shouldn’t carry time.

Past love

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

He tells me how planets orbit each other, offers five

long-stemmed roses, red-faced, shuffles from one foot

to the other. He speaks of constellations, particles,

Telstars, ends up asking in a snatched speech, What is

the meaning of life? I wonder if now’s a good time

to tell him about you, but talk instead about the rising star

of Orion, which I know nothing about, and on a scale of

one-to-ten am hovering around three in my knowledge of the cosmos.

I hope he’ll ask again, some time when I’m ready,

but he moves effortlessly forward and the blooms of two roses

fall like stardust, soundlessly, like you did, when somehow

your life was sucked, ever so gently, from your lungs.

When I held you, there was no noise from this galaxy

or another or another, and we spent that night wondering

how the sun lit only other people, and how breathless

the universe can be when you need air the most.

Last night

Nothing happens like winter. Not even

the clock’s slow tick next to your hospital bed

can deaden like snow. Its long, sleek crucifix hands

still drag themselves as if through drifts, ice’s fog,

to carve time’s unsteady voice

in this half-darkened ward, on this sterile night.

I walk into a whirl of flakes, mouth wide as a hole

chipped through ice so I can fish and feed you.

I think I’ve been an Inuit at some time past,

culled a seal, pulled its pelt from shoulder

to cheek just to keep warm. I check on my children,

burrowed in furs, every hour of their waking.

When they’re asleep I still pinch and poke them

with an ungloved forefinger and thumb,

know I love them more than time itself –

know time isn’t forever, that it can melt

any day now and I’ll lose myself in a river of you,

slide behind in slippers of meltwater.

You breathe frost on the clock’s face. And it stops.

My veins are blurred with cold, skin just a mist in air.

Is it you who is leaving my touch?

I can’t take my hands from you, though the nurse tugs.

I can’t take the way you are thawing

when I’ve shut the blinds to keep out morning’s light.

Where you used to be

Your shape is here again, slides into your chair,

as if every night you’re fastened to cushions,

stripping feathers from your wings like silence.

I flick the TV ‒ channel by channel ‒ until shadows...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigrph
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Acknowledgements
• About the author and this book