Anne Elvey



white on white

mill intersect hangs elect bleach spilt embossed construct practice ratchet etch extract start

the pulp where two roads and the smoke above chandler highway like a pope then the effluent over the yarra’s plane 150gsm card the origami of skin kafka’s machine white white white white the middle letter to your Invasion

Kelp’s crossing

The mile long pier at Port Germein is worn by steps like mine. Today the wind is salt and pushes on the cross. Beneath the jetty a rusty scarf unfurls. Deep the currents, deep their dyes are emerald, violet, teal. My heart is in my tread. The day blusters in my ears. The wood beats in my bones until an end comes into focus and a merwoman surfaces at the turn. From a hollow board she draws a filament twisted with posidonia. Seagrass combines with ochre. A coarse conglomerate of sand and shell lies under the ocean. On straps of macrocystis, gas floats in bulbs, translucent, flax, and tangled with the line. Rusted into a snag a hook comes free. I turn. She follows. The wind lifts the ropes of our hair. These snakes do not petrify. Pacific gulls hang over us like white-capped albatross. The merwoman laughs, her eyes crystal with sun. Beyond the beach in outline, a motorbike, two cars and the public lav congregate, while a eucalypt makes a genuflection on the ordinary solace of the shore.

Anne Elvey lives in Seaford, Victoria. Ecopoetic, postcolonial and new materialist perspectives, on human relationships to place and things, inform her writing. Her most recent chapbook is Bent toward the thing (2012). She had poems shortlisted in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2012 and the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2011.
http://anneelvey.wordpress.com
 
 
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