consummations
bloodspcand green
hallow the verdigris
touch of air and
agespcthe sulphate
bluespcand old
ringsspccopper
bands for arthritis
the clasps of a book
andspcdark alleys
wet cobbles
stone the shade of
charcoalspcsomething
to burnspclike a page
torn from a life
censorialspcthe thurible
swungspc over the editorial
ispca sound bite
ripped for a pod
at nightspca thin
plume of smoke
and yet a feeling
of having made it
your child's latest
legospcor a pile
of ashes at the turn
of a lanespcwhere
the breathing animal you are
nestles close to
goodspca fragile
kindness to the ground
with some small thing
given backspcat last
gd: being neither god, nor ground, nor good
The i of complexity is more than the real that saturates the line.
This could be mathematics, where an e and a pi exceed
our capacity to write them, like a life, like this universe
that for all its betweens — coordinates stretched across
cartesian undulations — seems calculable. Yet this line,
ancestral with infinity i could dive into, stretches to fold
on fold of surd and sine like an insoluble problem, or the elegance
of a moment, when our congress turns to this continuity
with things that bends us round, moulded to the string
of time. And all our curves and angles intersect with gd.
désistance
... a subject in désistance is one that is in withdrawal, in the sense either of withdrawing itself or of being withdrawn — or, better still, in the sense of remaining nicely balanced between these alternatives.
–John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject
The pluck of ions
exhales a chord of
blue that softens,
as the street
bends toward home.
There, at the far
corner — where the notice
says they'll film next week —
the houses and street gums
step aside for sky
almost pixelate,
as these white spots
play before my eyes,
like the scatter of
rising too quickly.
Here, where world is
more and less
than tree and tar,
words hold back like night
the sun, neither
a mother to us all (nor not).
Anne Elvey is a researcher and poet, and author of An Ecological Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Luke: A Gestational Paradigm. Her poems have appeared in Antipodes, Cordite, Eremos, Meanjin and PAN.