Stephen Edgar

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.

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 That hand is just as magically withdrawn.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .

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 a tableau Vivant and 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.