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Poems

Auspices Read Poem

In siftings of chromatic sediment
Shed by the winter hours as they decay,
With slow descent
Light settles through the lower sky in peach,
Then mauve, then pale self-abnegating gray
Against the water, now that day is spent
At Bennetts Beach,

Under the high withdrawing blueness, band
On band, like layers in a decorative
Bottle of sand,
Enclosed beneath the heavens’ dome, as though
This were the perfect realm in which to live,
Preserved, unburdened by the least demand,
Or wish, to know—

And simply be.

Along the beach convene
Some silver gulls which stand around reﬂecting
Upon the sheen
That comes and goes about their scarlet feet,
And crested terns ﬂy back and forth inspecting
The shallows for a last titbit to glean,
And lightly treat

A two-faced wind that works its way across
The metal of the sea it tries to planish
And to emboss,
While deep in its unbalanced buffetings
Gannets alternately appear and vanish,
Plunge, rise, and loft and give their heads a toss.

These things, these things.

.

.

What future, though, in that simplicity?

If the observer alters what’s observed,
Simple to see
The brilliant creatures may not long survive
Our scrutiny.

And yet, what would be served
By aeons of extravagance to be
Merely alive,

Without the knowing eye, though its regard
Should bring to light what turns the world to stone?

Does the same hard
Attention that we boast of here abound,
Or has it been and gone among the starred
Immenseness—meaning we must fare alone,
Lost where we’re found?

Beyond Yacaaba Head towards the east
The colors harbored in that sediment
Have been released
And all the lower sky is banked with ash,
Dulled to gunmetal gray.

In the event
The gannets, calling it a day, have ceased
Their white panache.

Only the sandhills, looking west, declare
A citrine wash that soon will vaporize
Into the air,
Like some faint exhalation breathed upon
The night, in which a ﬂock of ibis rise,
As though they had a mind to follow where
The light has gone.

The Building of Light Read Poem

Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’s
River-blurred, inchoate border.

Dawn’s old story; and light tries—
Not the last time—to devise
Lasting order;

From ﬁrst principles assigns
Laws to frame day’s jurisdiction;
Drawing contours, shapes, and lines
From the nebula, it shines,
Strange as ﬁction.

Such designs, though, won’t appear
In the plans of a committee.

Look.

The moon’s pale-copper sphere
Rings—a gong too faint to hear—
Through the city.

Let them linger, unawake.

Down the mountain’s wrinkled brilliance
Darkness empties like a lake.

Minted gold, house windows make
Coins worth millions.

Both in disbelief and pride
All the buildings in the distance
On the river’s farther side
Take up, as the shadows slide,
New existence.

Shadow slides along the roof,
Past the guttering and gable,
Shrinks, and leaves the house aloof
Where the light reads out its proof
Like a fable.

Divine Rights Read Poem

Sprawling like some small group of picnickers,
They're propped among the shadows of the trees,
Though one seems drunk, spread-eagled.

Nothing stirs
Except the flies that clog their cavities.

A red cleft rules the parting of that head.

You stretch a little and slide out of bed.

Acres of debris are in sodden flood
About the ruined village, which concedes
In blackened matchwood to the tide of mud
Its smoking households.

Rising from the weeds,
Arms reach up stiffly, as for an embrace.

Out of the mirror you observe your face

While sunlight offers all that you desire.

The Aztecs, to appease your counterparts,
Would hook still-living bodies from the fire,
Hack out and hold aloft the pulsing hearts,
Drenching the steps with blood, so they might give
Those idle brutes each day a day to live.

You have today.

Stark-eyed and hollow-faced,
Her rigid ribcage almost bursting through
The skin, a girl sits in a land laid waste
And stares out blankly.

So then, it is you—
The thought had not occurred to you before—
It's you, Huitzilopochtli, God of War.

The House of Time Read Poem

And fleetingly it seemed to him
That in between one eye blink and the next
Time paused, allowing time to be installed
Within that countless interim,
Coiled up, on hold,
A memory predicted and recalled.

Now, that weak muscle flexed,
All that contained him started to unfold

In front of him, a moving book
In three dimensions he could wander through,
At will, at any point, now, since, before,
To feel, to listen and to look—
A house, or suite
Of rooms around a circling corridor,
And waiting there, he knew,
Were all the peopled days he’d not repeat.

Slowly he stretched his hand to open
The first door on his right.

Why, this was easy:
Christmas when he was seven, and his aunt
Playing a polonaise by Chopin,
Badly.

“Lenore,
We know you think you can, dear, but you can’t.

”
And he was resting, queasy
From too much pudding.

Now, another door:

So far, so faint, not yet an I,
A pulse of sense, he hung upon a web
Of knitted blood.

Above, the muffled heart
Performed its mindless lullaby
And in the womb
He slept on half awake.

That was his part
Elsewhere, too, at the ebb
Of his last consciousness.

Another room:

He recognized at once the face
Of one who five years hence he would have bound
As closely to him as a Siamese twin.

How recklessly he would replace
That loving care.

Absorbed, now, in the dream of skin on skin,
He whispered the profound
And destined promises she’d never share.

He shuddered, shut it, and proceeded.

So room on room, all of his scenes, arranged
In simultaneous succession, played
Before him, unignored, unheeded,
Each atableau
Vivantand drama, driven and yet stayed,
Developing, unchanged.

At last the time that paused for time to flow

He saw was coming to an end.

He saw himself before himself, distinct
As when—a life ago—it came to him
A single blink could comprehend,
And then unfold,
All time within that countless interim.

He blinked.

And then he blinked.

And time continued as it coiled, on hold.

Lost to View Read Poem

A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’s receding wall

A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape

In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.

No one.

No human presence has been known,
Surely, to venture here.

It takes one blackbird to disown
That vagary
And, whistling just a few feet from his ear,

To call him back again and make him be
The subject in this scene,
The one who is required to see.

Another day,
No blackbird with its song will intervene.

The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway.

Made to Measure Read Poem

Impossible to wield
The acreage of the fabric that unfolded,
Slung from his shoulders like a crumpled field:
The distance from one Christmas to the next
When he was only seven
Was aching there; a foreign city flexed
Among the ripples; a face, the star-shocked heaven
About his flailing arms were shrugged and moulded.

Too heavy to outrun,
Too slow to measure what it underwent,
Though gradually the passage of the sun,
Unmanageable in its train of light,
Seemed almost to respond
As he yanked the yards of stuff in like a kite
And gathered the brocade that trailed beyond
His arms' reach to the scale of measurement,

However strange the weave
That writhed about the working of his hands:
The footage too atrocious to believe,
Printed with corpses; Greece; the falls of salmon;
Her upturned silken wrist
He would have torn out history to examine;
His father's final blessing, which he missed.

However far he comes or where he stands,

At last, and limb by limb,
Contour by contour, that unfolded cape
Settles ever more fittingly on him.

His forehead is the line of the sky's vault,
His shoulders trace the ground,
His palms the ways he wandered by default,
And in his gestures those he knew are found.

What shape the day discovers is his shape.

Murray Dreaming Read Poem

It’s not the sharks
Sliding mere inches from his upturned face
Through warps of water where the tunnel arcs
Transparent overhead,
Their lipless jaws clamped shut, extruding teeth,
Their eyes that stare at nothing, like the dead,
Staring at him; it’s not the eerie grace
Of rays he stood beneath,
Gaping at their entranced slow-motion chase

That is unending;
It’s not the ultra-auditory hum
Of ET cuttlefish superintending
The iridescent craft
Of their lit selves, as messages were sent,
Turning the sight of him they photographed
To code: it is not this that left him dumb
With schoolboy wonderment
Those hours he wandered the aquarium.

It is that room,
That room of Murray River they had walled
In glass and, deep within the shifting gloom
And subtle drifts of sky
That filtered down, it seemed, from the real day
Of trees and bird light many fathoms high,
The giant Murray cod that was installed
In stillness to delay
All that would pass.

The boy stood there enthralled.

Out in the day
Again, he saw the famous streets expound
Their theories about speed, the cars obey,
Racing to catch the sun,
The loud fast-forward crowds, and thought it odd
That in the multitudes not everyone
Should understand as he did the profound
Profession of the cod,
That held time, motionless, unknown to sound.

In bed at night,
Are his eyes open or is this a dream?

The room is all dark water, ghosted light,
And midway to the ceiling
The great fish with its working fins and gills
Suspended, while before it glide the reeling
And see-through scenes of day, faintly agleam,
Until their passage stills
And merges with the deep unmoving stream.

Nocturnal Read Poem

It's midnight now and sounds like midnight then,
The words like distant stars that faintly grace
The all-pervading dark of space,
But not meant for the world of men.

It's not what we forget
But what was never known we most regret
Discovery of.

Checking one last cassette
Among my old unlabelled discards, few
Of which reward the playing, I find you.

Some years after her death, but years ago,
Hearing Gwen's voice recite "Suburban Sonnet,"
At first we could not focus on it,
So jolted that the radio
Should casually exhume
From our shared memory the woman whom
We knew and make her present in the room,
As though in flesh, surprised to find that she
Had earned this further immortality.

Who ever thought they would not hear the dead?

Who ever thought that they could quarantine
Those who are not, who once had been?

At that old station on North Head
Inmates still tread the boards,
Or something does; equipment there records
The voices in the dormitories and wards,
Although it's years abandoned.

Undeleted,
What happened is embedded and repeated,

Or so they say.

And that would not faze you
Who always claimed events could not escape
Their scenes, recorded as on tape
In matter and played back anew
To anyone attuned
To that stored energy, that psychic wound.

You said you heard the presence which oppugned
Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion
In your lost house.

I scarcely need persuasion,

So simple is this case.

Here in the dark
I listen, tensing in distress, to each
Uncertain fragment of your speech,
Each desolate, half-drunk remark
You uttered unaware
That this cassette was running and would share
Far in the useless future your despair
With one who can do nothing but avow
You spoke from midnight, and it's midnight now.

Oswald Spengler Watches the Sunset Read Poem

The air is drenched with day, but one by one
The flowers close on cue,
Obedient to the declining sun.

Forest and grasses, bush and leaf and stem,
They cannot move (and nor, you dream, can you);
It is the wind that plays with them.

Only the little midges dancing still
Against the evening move at will.

This tiny swarm still dancing on and on
Like something in a net
Expanding and contracting, that late swan
Towing its wake, a solitary crow
Crossing the twilight in its silhouette,
The fox proceeding sly and slow:
They are small worlds of purpose which infuse
The world around with will to choose.

An animalcule in a drop of dew—
And so diminutive
That if the human eye should look clear through
That globe there would be nothing there to see—
Although it only has a blink to live,
Yet in the face of this is free;
The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot
Hangs from a single leaf, is not.

The Red Sea Read Poem

Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,
In which clear surface, just a little way
From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass
With languid ease, apparently unmanned,
Adrift along the day,

Imagining a breeze to fan
Their motion, though there's none.

Siobhan
Reaches a giant hand down from the sky
And nudges with insouciant élan
The nearest hull, her bended waist mast-high.

That hand is just as magically withdrawn.

So moves the catamaran.

And through the Lilliputian fleet
She, Beatrice and Gabrielle
Wade in the shallows, knee-deep, spaceman-slow,
To fashion their maneuvers and compete
Among the stationed hours to and fro,
While watching through the viscid slide and swell
Of water their white feet,

Made curiously whiter by
That cool light-bending element.

Doubled by shadows on the sand they glimpse
Pipefish and darting fingerlings they try
Impossibly to grab, translucent shrimps
Among the laceweed, seahorses intent
To flee the peopled sky.

Hard to conceive that they should be
Precisely who they are and here,
Lost in the idle luxury of play.

And hard to credit that the selfsame sea
That joins them in their idleness today,
Careless of latitude and hemisphere,
Blind with ubiquity,

Churns elsewhere with a white uproar,
Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees,
Or sucks among the scum and floating drums
Of some forgotten outpost founded for
The advent of an age that never comes,
Or bobs the remnants of atrocities
Limply against the shore.

What luck they have.

And what good sense
To leave the water with their toys
When called, before their fortunes are deranged.

And still the day hangs in its late suspense
For hours without them, virtually unchanged,
Until the bay's impregnable turquoise
Relaxes its defense

And sunset's dye begins to spread
In flood across it to the sand
They stood on, as though, hoping to disown
The blood of all the innocents he'd shed,
Macbeth incarnate or his grisly clone
Had stooped on some far shore to rinse his hand,
Making the green one red.

Saccade Read Poem

They have no sense of what they’re looking at,
Unless the object moves.

(Or so he’s read; who knows if that’s the case?

)
A painted bird’s an empty analogue
To the oblivious cat.

And it is not his still familiar face
So much as that distinctive gait which proves
The master to his dog,
Who frolics for him like an acrobat.

His eyes need movement too, but make their own.

His most fixated gaze—
On one small figure in a Bruegel scene,
Or on the camber of his lover’s lip
He worships unbeknown,
As though no time or change will supervene—
Aflicker with saccade, adjusts and strays
Minutely to equip
His mind to take in what is being shown.

And maybe consciousness employs saccade
As well, and flickers back
And forth, now in the world, now, briefly, out—
The way the gum tree’s canopy overhead
Flickers with light and shade,
So every leaf is momently in doubt—
Its faith saved by such intermittent lack
From being surfeited,
Its constant sense being constantly unmade.

Bound for Hell Read Poem

Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.

We, who did not manage to devote
Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway
Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat,
Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.

Every morning, every day, we’d rise
And have the finest Chinese silks to wear;
And we’d strike up the songs of paradise
Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,

We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran,
Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been
Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan:
The world was ours, each one of us a queen.

First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled,
Then plaited with a starry diadem;
We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled:
But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,

Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden
Where apple trees from paradise are found.

No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent
And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.

In Memoriam, July 19, 1914 Read Poem

We aged a hundred years and this descended
In just one hour, as at a stroke.

The summer had been brief and now was ended;
The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke.

The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring
Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell.

And so I covered up my face, imploring
God to destroy me before battle fell.

And from my memory the shadows vanished
Of songs and passions—burdens I'd not need.

The Almighty bade it be—with all else banished—
A book of portents terrible to read.

Incident at Grantley Manor Read Poem

Seven o’clock, the time set in his mind



Like herbs displayed in aspic, as the chimes



Were striking.

Then the squeaking of his shoes’



 



Black leather tread, pacing those measures down



The first-floor hall, where sunset’s apricot



Was oozing nectar through the open doors.

Her voice, conspiratorial and astonished,



Called him across the bedroom’s drowning cube



Towards the window.

How well Miss Waterson



 



Remembers it: “Please come and look at this,



Mr Devine;” the clock on the mantelpiece



Rehearsing for the hour of seven.

She pointed



 



Down.

There, a moving picture on the lawn,



His father, like a patient whose long months



Of immobility meant learning afresh



 



The art of walking, climbing the light’s green slope



Towards the summer house, looking intently



As though for a cuff link or a signature.

That evening he still thinks of, lying now,



No longer needing lessons for his legs,



How he cast back his glance and saw the windows



 



Blazing like cats’ eyes on his uselessness,



And in that golden mirror, two gold figures



Recording him, two shadows of dark gold—



 



Miss Waterson (was it?

) and another one—



And then took out his watch on which the hands



Were so meticulously assembling seven.

Young Emily, appointed just the week



Before, came rushing to the stairs—she’d seen



Him stumble—to advise Mr Devine



 



About his father’s fall.

And so, almost



Immobilized herself in that clinging syrup,



She observed the hall clock’s quaint rendition of



 



Seven, the time set clearly in his mind



Like summer herbs in aspic, as the chimes



Were striking.

Then the squeaking of his shoes’



 



Black leather tread, pacing those measures down



The corridor, where sunset’s apricot



Was oozing nectar through the open doors.

Her voice, companionable but astonished,



Floated across the bedroom’s drowning cube



As he descended.

How well Miss Waterson



 



Remembers it: “Please come and look at this;”



And Emily, who had just been taken on



That week, came rushing to the window.

She pointed



 



Down, smartly on the stroke of seven.

There,



A moving picture on the lawn, was old



Mr Devine, like a patient whose long months



 



Of immobility meant learning afresh



The art of walking, climbing the light’s green slope



Abstractedly towards the rose garden.

That evening he still thinks of, lying now,



No longer needing lessons for his legs,



How he cast back his glance and saw the windows



 



Glaring like cats’ eyes on his helplessness,



And in that golden mirror, two gold figures



Gesticulating, two shadows of dark gold—



 



The new girl (was it?

) and another one—



And then took out his watch on which the hands



Were so laboriously assembling seven.

Miss Waterson, with Emily behind her



In a panic, dashed to the stairs to find



Mr Devine, anxious to let him know



 



About his father’s fall.

And there they saw him,



Almost immobile in that clinging syrup,



And heard the hall clock’s muffled tolling of



 



Seven, the time set firmly in his mind .

.

.

Contents Page Read Poem

The jungle, from the floor to the canopy,

Clogs and entwines

Its every rung and level with rank growth.

The python dines

Among an epiphytic gaudery

And hungry vines.

On the mizzled hair of the two-toed sloth

Moss has designs.

Yet all that climbing tonnage is content-free.

The top limbs sway as though to write in air,

But can’t remember what they scribble there.

Through the savanna’s heat-glaze the herds pause,

Ripple and shiver,

Or graze hypnotically, or drop their young,

Which may deliver

Their wet thin steps into the lion’s jaws.

By pool or river

They stoop at evening side by side among

The surface quiver

Of their reflexions as the light withdraws:

A fable set down in invisible ink;

They print their shadows on the pool they drink.

Even the perfect pictures in the shale’s

Slow-motion traps,

The filamentous feathers, which one or two

Sharp hammer taps

Release, the fish in their meticulous scales,

The precise maps

Of leaves, did not direct this rendezvous.

They’re simply gaps

In time, and have no part in these details.

The weird wiwaxias, worms and arthropods

Were empty of intention as stone gods.

Once, though, a figure had the thought to crawl

Out of the day

Into a cave’s dark reach, its first invoker,

And there to splay

His hand against the tallow-glimmered wall,

And pause to spray

His mouth’s cargo of spittle and red ochre

On the array

Of his five fingers, clear, indelible:

Author and content of the space displayed,

The maker’s hand becoming what it made.

The Menger Sponge Read Poem

God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through —Paul Valéry







Lost from all angles but the sun’s,

 This woken morning,



It clicks its brilliance into place at once,



If you follow the fall of light—



A spider web, head-high, adorning



The woodshed’s entrance like a sheet



Of gold-shot fabric, metal-tight,



That, even so, one handswipe could delete,



Collapsing all



That spacious architecture to a tacky ball.

It brings to mind the mathematician’s



Monstrous idea,



The Menger sponge, where infinite excisions



Out of a solid cube delete



Its substance while its form stays clear:



The central ninth is cut from a square;



Eight smaller squares remain; repeat



For each; and so on with this lattice of air:



A formula



For zero volume, infinite surface area.

Enough.

The estuary’s slung



Like gold-shot cloth



Over a gulf of shifting airs.

Among



Cloud-drifts of beaten eggwhite floats,



As though confected of such froth,



The mountain.

Like a Chinese screen,



The fabric of the view devotes



Almost all blankness to this hanging scene,



This one handsweep



Of water, creased like the cheek of someone roused from sleep.

Poems by Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar (born 1951) is an Australian poet, editor and indexer.

Poems