The Peony by Stephen Edgar

Australian poet, Stephen Edgar, has given me permission to post some of his poems from time to time. The following poem, from his masterful collection, Exhibits of the Sun, just about breaks my heart every time I read it. And I read it often.

On the back cover of his book, poet Joshua Mehigan states that Stephen Edgar is, "On the short list of the best living practitioners of verse, rhymed or blank."  I totally agree.

The Peony

In the aftermath, your memory in free fall,

You’re less a consciousness than that

Recording camera Isherwood narrated.

The now unearthly hall,

The living room (the living room), translated

To this inert museum habitat,

The bathroom window’s watermark

Pooled wetly on the polished kitchen floor,

You are not looking at

Exactly, but provide the focus for.

They slide across your cornea’s moist arc.

You have no sense that they make sense,

The images are simply filed away

By that synaptic spark

With matters you don’t know of to convey.

From the hollow house you stray to the intense

Exhibit archive of the shed:

Tools, shelves of junk in which the ivy glories,

Prints, books of evidence

Of elsewhere in a cupboard, whose mucid stories

You can’t read now. But in a garden bed,

More wounding than a work of art,

The peony’s packed, swollen buds, which hold

Whole galaxies of red

And forces too immense to be controlled,

Wait quietly to tear the day apart.