Cuneiform tablet
What can no longer be
touched—the aged skin, the rare,
rests in a muted light, in a spotlight—
short print runs, handmade things
in a cave of black partitions, glass echoes
of the old museum and the walkthroughs
housing phosphorescent rocks
in that labyrinthine place gone to angled
steel and here
the Beat poets, botanica
in nineteenth-century inks, a Torah scroll
and an ancient notepad of clay. The wedges
signify stock whose descendants
were skinned for the scroll under glass
or for a codex named
for a mountain. On the third floor
under the State Library’s dome,
by a roped-off spiral stair
the indentations in the clay recall
the press of a sharpened reed.
Tablets of this size were also used
for travel inventories and sacrificial
lists. They hardened in fire
or sun. This palm pilot was stacked
for burning. Framed against the dark
in a precise atmosphere it is preserved
under glass. I cannot deposit my oil
in its grooves, nor weigh its matter
in a glove. Three clasps hold it
like a jewel.
Mary of Magdala
if the hunger remains
that held her
and the oldest stories do not concur
she is painted, a candle in a mirror, one hand
on a skull
if the book she holds—let’s not assume
we know which book
it is—opens
on a language
as quick as the nematodes that cling to roots
beneath the first blanket of soil
when the whole busy world of decomposing
dark and dense
is—under the rain—a welcome
chain of being
if she rests against a stone
where ants climb, intent as angels
on a ladder
that inclines between earth and sky
and if all that cannot be touched falls in clumps
like spitfires on an oil-stained drive
it is the beginning
of a loss
that makes things possible—four trees
grow around her words—
we see in icons
she holds a flask of ointment and an egg
Mortal life
for Robert Adamson
This is the wild
thing that turns
to loam, the seal pup
dead on the shore,
a fish caught
in a crevice of rock
when the tide ebbs.
The wind shakes
the cabin. The sea
is gathered in, pulled up
in white snatches
that break over
tidal pools.
There are rabbits
in the scrub, a cormorant
on the rocks. This is
the woman with unkempt
hair, in a room
that is forgotten.
It is not a basement.
It is not an attic.
She will not be consumed
in a fire set
by madness. It is
the priest’s hole
no longer used,
the bushranger’s cave,
the feel of a place
that might be men’s
business—if the warning
signs were known—
the disorienting polis,
the agora of the soul
where mortal things
meet, the dam where a heron
dips her bill.
Melbourne-based Anne Elvey holds honorary appointments at Monash University, Trinity College and MCD University of Divinity. She is author of Stolen Heath (Melbourne Poets Union, 2009), Claimed by Country (PressPress, 2010) and Bent toward the thing (Rosslyn Avenue, 2012), in support of The Sunflower Foundation. Her poem “Bayside Suburban” was shortlisted for the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.