Anne Elvey’s poems have appeared in Antipodes, Cordite, Eureka Street, Eremos, Meanjin, PAN, and Salt Lick Quarterly. In 2008, her work was placed first in the page seventeen poetry competition and highly commended in the Max Harris Poetry Award. Her research in ecocriticism and biblical studies is supported by Melbourne College of Divinity and the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Anne lives in Coburg, Victoria.
Love’s ghost
The egret’s poised
on a platform
of silt. While it seems
she walks on water,
she wades knee
deep, with grace to
impale the soul.
She is the sign
for a clef
between treble and bass –
not yet invented –
or perhaps above,
a body that is reeds’
song, that
when she alights is
more than air. She
hangs her plumes
on sky’s stave:
score for the orches-
tra between us. And
she breathes there,
knows other
things, but
(like you and me)
does not know
what takes flight
when you raise your
hand for silence.
Paperbark, Ashgrove
Dense with tenderness your layered skin is ragged
as if torn by an ancestral scribe
and laid tuck against tuck against trunk,
the innocent flesh shed and held –
like a word you might say about yourself –
as wind breathes against your weeping delicate leaves
that eat the light.
Your body drinks
and deep inside remakes the soil and sun.
So two crows call that you have called them here
and your wood’s joy
at their impertinence
erupts
in peels of flesh.
Is it strip me you say?
Or do colonial eyes see paper where flesh is?
Did your shedding call older hands to ochre?
What is this breath that lifts like a curtain
your lanceolate leaves
where each one’s caress
pierces the space it defines?