Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Five November-December 2024
Solder, poems by Anne Elvey.
Solder
Intent to be other to the flow but lured, molten
into connectivity, the spill of psyche to circuit
lies hot against the binary that privileges
the one over the multiplicity. Honed to lift
of branch and soil’s pulse, the sun’s bidding
in green cell, nothing is zeroed in on souls
that hammer and haunt like early light. Or is it
speech? The tempest-telling sprites, acolytes
of climate, keep their fossiled tracts extant
in bones and breath, distillations of seeped stone.
These noughts with units on a grid, do they
discount the long mugging of the land? Bled
quarries – sunset captures them. Whose lives
are extracted for works that take natures from
selves, from our embedding in the commons? Is
fluid alloy’s response to flame a recompense?
Sophia
She came to me in a clearing
the quiet sun sifting through
trees’ canopy, the day soft
as moonlit night surrounding
heart’s dusk or dawn – might
I not tell? She was a breath
of knowing, tender against my
oldest scars though I could
not fathom what brought her
into my waking dream or why
when I look inside she remains
a subtle presence – discreet &
unassuming, as if a healing should
proceed, shy of the everyday
like a bat. Her body’s leathered
wings fold into limb & leaf.
Wind rustles in the shelter of her
foliate tilt towards grace
To the will maker of branching breath
Leave me the hospitality of words
how a good sentence can
salve, like an instrument’s compassion,
strummed tremor of line, fingers’
pulse on wood, or mallet to timpani –
how they ground an orchestra
with surprising character, warm and
low – a capacity to let be when
voice arrives – diaphragm, throat
ear – flowing like freedom, lungs
expanded. How then I’ll forget
hurt, forgive what’s unintended,
give to quiet the wholeness we’re
gravitating towards, as day
lets go and wind plays through
night’s yard, unsettled, soothing
© Anne Elvey
Anne Elvey is a poet, editor and researcher, living on unceded Bunurong Country in bayside Naarm/Melbourne. Her most recent poetry collections are Leaf (Liquid Amber Press, 2022), shortlisted in the 2023 ASLE-UKI Book Prize for the best work of creative writing with an ecological theme, and Obligations of voice (Recent Work Press, 2021). A new collection ‘Intents’ is forthcoming from Liquid Amber Press in April 2025.