Listening at night The noise of the rain is all around the house, as ifa Bruegel, with its rounded villagers' bawdy businessand children's games, is being staged on the verandah.In the daytime the cockies toss acorns from the oak that stands over the bedroom. The tree drops them nowitself and the rain, finished some ten minutes ago,falls from the leaves in syncopated time. The woodcreaks, as if the walls and the limbs concur that they are out in the antipodes with their rolling hoops, walkingon stilts, the possums striking the piñata with their tailsand throwing the quince about the garden, like walnutsor spinning tops. In this raucous abundance, the dark, not the peasant tones of Bruegel, holds me with two souls,the comfort of the covers; the shady occupation of the oak.
The little matter of light Photons catch a rim as if cloud were solid,an icon of atmosphere the sun trims with goldleaf. They are not champagne in the mouth. They are oysters working grit into seedsto glisten on the tongue. They linger on a roadwhere taillights stream, are the after-image of a flash the eye with its gloved hand catches.They are words the night is memorising like the faceof a beloved. They mean distance, mean a past seen in the present. They uncurl in grey folds,pulse lemon when the world dips withanticipation, that matter might make love.
The mortal utteranceafter Isaiah It is a coalpicked from the fire at the altar of mercy.A gust billows — smoke fillsthe tent pitched for a god. One rednote pulses where the cherubblows. A seraph's breath blistersthe lips. The tongue, gingerly at first,feels for the burn. What a tenderrasp. Magnified, the anemone clustermoist as a grammar that might repaira world, might in saliva steepthe possible thing — language beyondutility. The phrase (the seraph stumbles)brands the open mouth. Hereis the wound's answer.
Anne Elvey is author of three chapbooks, the most recent being Bent Toward the Thing (2012). She is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics and holds honorary appointments at Monash University and MCD University of Divinity.