His palm was her country
Mute Morning
i.m. Carol Hogan
I woke in a strange dream of a priest
who pitied the child born to the mother
no longer a nun. From the pew behind
I was the I that spoke up to power.
When I woke, the light was soft, grey
with a promise of rain. But on the ear
the camellia—with its early winter splashes
of deep pink—squawked the squawk
of a wattlebird, answered from the next
yard. I wrote you a card, knowing I would
not see you again in this, the only transience
we have. Dressed and breakfasted, I walked
for forty minutes to the beach—and back—
where the sea and sky bled into each other
a wash of blue and grey, a tone I recalled
from the stained glass florets of a Mary
window. I posted the card on the way,
not knowing you had already died.
Black and white
Black smudges beneath the eyes of the white
dog fall, like tear-wet mascara. His walker’s
eyes are kohled. She is an Egyptian deity
with the look of Greater Frankston. I, too,
have it—the appearance that invites offers
of Dead Sea masks in the middle aisle
of the Bayside Shopping Centre. Last week
she picked handfuls of moult from his belly.
Clumps of white fur composed a still life
on the path with possum scats and leaf-fall,
as I hurried for the city train. Magpies in their
livery were sorting their song sheets for the
morning chorus. Overhead, beak dipping
into the insulator, a mynah breakfasted.
The look
He saw the god in the bent-winged chick
that he carried and fed
with fruit and grain. The cage
he had not built for her
hung from the sky,
was without a door. Open
his palm was her country. She was quiet
there. Her feathered skin
and pulsing breast,
taken together, said
bird. Though flightless, she was made for
flight. Her bright beads
met his eyes with
a knowledge air gives to wings.
To the bookmaker god
With your ticket and stub you make a book
of my heart. When my hand reads the ridges
on the pacer’s spine, the bindings whisper in tongues.
The roan of my favourite season whickers like a fold
in a leaf. With the rustle of silk, the winter sun
will canter the aisles, burnish the wood.
Later, after the spring carnival, I’ll re-shelve
the rhetoric of love, write for nothing else.
I’ll check the Dewey for harness and bit, catalogue
turf with green, and find your Cup in the stacks.
Anne Elvey is author of Kin (Five Islands, 2014) and three poetry chapbooks. She is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics and holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity,