The Strangest Place


Cover image Anika lifting to her ancestors, on a spider-string, over Mt Cooroora, in Kabi-Kabi country — Lumochrome glass print by Judith Nangala Crispin

The Strangest Place was published by Black Pepper Publishing in 2020. The new book offers a retrospective on Stephen Edgar’s career — selected poems from each of his previous ten books, with an opening, book-length section of new poems.

The following three new poems from the book are displayed on this page:

  • Apprehensions
  • Dawn Solo
  • Shadow Line

Apprehensions

A spattering of early sun
Flung through the high leaves of the eucalypts,
Like dabs and splashes of shellac,
Or spangles on a pool cast up to stun
The ceiling. So, the day is back.
Each note of the rainbow lorikeets encrypts
A quick scintilla, a synaesthetic pun.

By ten, the house is all your own.
She’s gone to work. And the dog, you keep forgetting,
Is gone now too. The radio
Emits its unattended monotone,
A streaming sonar beam, as though
Sounding the day’s deceptive depths, and vetting
The echoes for what must remain unknown.

The rooms take on the false proportions
Flaunted in real estate advertisements,
Unless perhaps it is the hours
That swell and stretch the place with their distortions.
A crane up on the hill’s crest towers
Over a future you can’t influence,
Against which your faint heart inanely cautions.

Later, as daylight starts to fail,
The two of you sit out in the courtyard with
A glass of wine and watch for Mars
Emerging in the heavens. And now, a pale
Astonishment against the stars,
The full moon rises to recite its myth.
Like children, how you love to have that tale

Retold. You never tire of it.
Well before dawn you wake up to the mind,
And its inveterate rigmarole,
Staring into the dark till you commit
That act of faith you can’t control,
Conscious again, you realize, and consigned
To the monstrous world you’re terrified to quit.

Dawn Solo

First light beside the Murray in Mildura,
Which like a drift of mist pervades
The eucalypt arcades,
A pale caesura

Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notes
To usher in the dawn are heard
From a pied butcherbird,
A phrase that floats

So slowly through the silence-thickened air,
Those notes, like globules labouring
Through honey, almost cling
And linger there.

Or is it that the notes themselves prolong
The time time takes, to make it stand,
Morning both summoned and
Called back by song.

Shadow Line

And there it is at last,
The last one gone, the final star,
The term of its self-fuelled fire surpassed
And cancelled. Nothing but a background hum
And darkness stretching through the nebular
Detritus into spans of time to come
More incommensurably vast,

Next to the reign of light,
Than Earth’s deep ages set beside
A mayfly’s one transparent day in flight.
But hale those aeons back and see the face
Of the dead planet swept and scarified
By strobe-lit storm clouds and red gales that chase
The skyline as the days ignite.

Just a few feet below
The stripped and lifeless regolith,
A narrow, blackened band would put on show
The fruits of our endeavour, a footnote
To the grand tale we’d left to reckon with,
A six-inch sooty layer laid down to quote
From that portentous folio:

Interred there and compressed,
The residue of all we’ve made,
Roads, sewers, factories, vehicles, would attest,
Plastics and pipes and wires and ticking meters,
The deathless works, the missiles on parade,
The Sphinx, the floating Taj Mahal, St Peter’s,
The half-lives haunting our bequest.

And so one might presage
That a mere grain, one molecule
That some outrider from a distant age
Sifted from all that indeterminate dross,
Might be the wattle leaves whose shadows pool
On a desk this afternoon, and brush across
The hand that’s poised above this page.

 

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