Chris Edwards, People of Earth

Acknowledgments

Some of these poems were first published in The Age, Australian Book Review, Boxkite,
Jacket, Meanjin, Poetry International Web, Southerly and Stylus Poetry Journal. Some
were also included in The Best Australian Poetry 2004, ed. Anthony Lawrence (UQP,
St Lucia, 2004), The Best Australian Poetry 2005, ed. Peter Porter (UQP, St Lucia,
2005), The Best Australian Poems 2006, ed. Dorothy Porter (Black Inc, Melbourne,
2006), The Best Australian Poetry 2007, ed. John Tranter (UQP, St Lucia, 2007), The
Best Australian Poems 2007, ed. Peter Rose (Black Inc, Melbourne, 2007), The Best
Australian Poems 2009, ed. Robert Adamson (Black Inc, Melbourne, 2009), Out of
the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets, ed. Michael Farrell and Jill
Jones (Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney, 2009) and The Best Australian Poems 2010, ed.
Robert Adamson (Black Inc, Melbourne, 2010). “Gone today, here tomorrow” was
commissioned by Johanna Featherstone for The Red Room Company’s Poetry Crimes
project (2005),and appeared in an earlier version on the Red Room Company website.
“m[ Hm” was commissioned by James Stuart for (and appeared in an earlier version
in) his anthology The Material Poem (Non-Generic Productions, 2007).

The poems in the first section of this book have been selected from utensils in a
landscape (Vagabond Press, Stray Dog Editions, 2001).The second section comprises
the English part of A Fluke: A mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de
dés” with parallel French pretext, published in print by Monogene (Thirroul, 2005)
and online in Jacket 29. Some of the poems in the third section, “People of Earth,”
previously appeared in Nicked (Vagabond Press, Rare Object Series, 2006).

The fourth section, “Some notes (or not) on Orpheus”, comprises the first
movement of a work in progress, Sonata for O, based very loosely on Rainer Maria
Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus. For an account of how I see the relationship, cf. my
Author’s Note in Jacket 36, where these sonnets were first published.

Many of the poems gathered here are built around (mis)quotations. Some
borrow only a single word, some borrow a few, others are a tissue of borrowings
throughout. My thanks and apologies to the sources listed at the back of this book,
and to any I failed to trace.

Thanks also to Robert Adamson, Michael Brennan, Lane Finlayson, Toby Fitch
and David Malouf for encouragement where appropriate and its antithesis where
need be, and for sound critical advice I have not always had the sense to follow.— CE

Published by
Vagabond Press, Sydney
www.vagabondpress.net

Cover collage, design and typography: Chris Edwards
Printed by Griffin Press, Australia

ISBN 978 0 9805113 7 6
© Chris Edwards 2011

Chris Edwards

People of Earth

VAGABOND PRESS
SYDNEY 2011

Contents

Utensils in a landscape

(…) 11
Peanuts 12
But me 13
A stopwatch 14
Bio 15
“©” 20
“When recently in Enniskillen…” 22
“By packet this morning…” 23
The adjunct 24
Valentine 27
Oh darn, ejection 30
The feast 32
I never 34
Exact wording 35
Gorgeous 36

A Fluke

Preface 39
A mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s
“Un Coup de dés …” 41

People of Earth

! 65
On the turn 66
What they gave him 68
Away someplace 69
Spooky 70
Time on their hands 71
Dear Sir Madam, 72
Re: really 74
As I am 75

The Don Merriam mishap 76
A display case 77
Shut-Up 78
Nicked 79
Look at that one! 80
Something big 82
No bid 83
Anthropomorphics 84
Missing something 85
People of Earth 86
Look homeward, angel 88
Why not 89
A door 90
Unconscious & herbal 91
Do bin 92
The awful truth 93
Untroubled 94
Someone to confide in 95
Alternatively 96
Only the handle 97
What S meant 98
Song 99
Learning outcomes 100
Rules for the ensemble 101
Half an inch of water 102
No such remedy 103
Works of et cetera

The set-up 104
“And the ...” 105
Dig in 106
Approx. 107
The trip to the grand hotel 108
A revisitation of the plague 109
The big picture 118
Odin b 119
Under my pillow 120

Plan C 121
Perhaps 122
Watching Louise Tuckwell 123
Guileless 124
The big splash 126
On his selection 127
Verily 128
Do you copy? 129
A lump sum maybe 130
Any minute now 131
Gone today, here tomorrow 132
As you can see 136
Lucky tsars 137
Some days 138
Fitfully & artfully 139
A letter 140
How did your tome go 141
Section Seven 142
An interlude of little light 144
Antlers, reinterpreted 145
Drinking with Li Po in the mountains 146
Whisky poet 147
Patient consent 148

Some notes (or not) on Orpheus
Rilke Renditions 1–11 151–161

Aha!
Ex.1: A case of the missing identity of … 165
Ex.2: In the simpering tones of a 173

m[ Hm 174

A glyph glossary 180
Sources 182

(…)

Dearly misbegotten, I am gathered here today
in fond rearguard to the memorial attraction,

works of
et cetera. I could set up my typewriter, unpredictable
spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors,
headset wired to the sequence of events

keep happening.
Meanwhile
might continue these festivities for
example we could b …
“plunder? what gambit is that?”
for the whirled four
twenty-first century
loomed.
“Who leaked a midnight pillow, queerly
pleased to keep eking out particles, clearly
similar implement, diffident tread
“Who caught marking (a) through to (z) of your choice
of the name I fled
a remainder
issued

11

Peanuts

“Correct! The photo is important! I say, Listen, they have nothing
When I get an idea. Then sit down and I make
peanuts — meaning that every time I open my mouth,
one blank turn of events
after the next bends cunningly toward me
as I go twirling
my baton toward the future —
I personally, I impersonally, I personified and so on, lurching
querulously across each brief tableau
begat by scarecrows
in this wilderness of thorns. You get the picture
framed and mounted and all that patching
starts to make a kind of sense.”

A hush fell over the locker room
is one way to describe it. Another way, my way,
is a warm gap between bleachers

“Like to earn a hundred dollars?”
took two loads of an astonishment. There were big deals
just beyond me, zooming in then out then in again

in a mad giddy rush while I
let a guy rope down from the scaffolding I’d
constructed as a kind of house. But it was him again,

deserted. Terrifying
soul of our surroundings, how innumerable your ripples,
to which my glances corresponded, pocketing

what they’d find!

12

But me

I suffer a lot from nasal congestion
and talk like this to avoid explaining
what topics refer to or how
far to the nearest sweatshop,
one of those enormous
pillars or towers
larger at the base than at the top.
Once, I covered the world with such progeny!
Now at the outset
these colums were intact and only later

notches, excavations
“in which he kept souvenirs, photographs, birth dates and so on.”
Each of them had only one thick, S-shaped, bent black leg.
Perhaps you’d like to bask in the reflected glitter or
strange people you meet in these places,
perhaps not.

My project, which began in
one room of the abyss, soon spread toward a perimeter
you can imagine, should you be inclined to do so.
First, make an incision
then talk artfully into the prevailing gap,
noting each whiff as it predisposes
the space between the lips or misplaced letters.

People are hey presto
but me, sometimes.

13

A stopwatch

There’s a crazy bridge that looks like a castle
in the upper reaches of the harbour
next to Tunks Park. I’d walk
the barbed-wire fence surrounding
beans, potato and tomato patches,
pumpkins and choko vines
that drummed simultaneously
with a deep, reverberating booming noise
of bats left clinging to the slippery sides
of the sense now made
of the enclosure. I discovered
I found myself back in the tin,
mumbling stuff about pigeons and a hoop,
and under the mud there were
stone turrets and peppermint trees
that began to craft words like
chainsaws taken to an oyster. Yet my life
continued unabated. Although some
complained that the tense kept changing,
others embraced that nagging sense
of a gnarled figure at a bus-stop,

thin as a pencil
at risk of thinking,
crawling around this oval of brass
that springs back like a trapdoor.

14

Bio

Many of you out there
will have encountered a world of calamity and ruin
with one last gasp at the end of it

and clearly labelled the instructions:
“this Day the Suprise Transport”

“port Saild from this”
and so on.
Not on our planet
yet still
that destination lingers —
terminus,
“animae viles, a sort of
excrementitious mass, that could be projected,
and accordingly was projected — ”
as detritus, cast “from the depth of a shipwreck”
floundering in the blast of an abandoned broadcast —
“Sudden effluvial aftermath here. Have encountered
daze without number…” — doomed
emission, vast dump “which departs from itself ”

as a wheezed, unavoidable, looming
exhalation — insidious galactic bloom
whose drift is a swift mutation aboard that
soundtrack lumbering in the background,
strange clank or muffled boom
heralding a dank impending cloudbank possibly
or black-and-white photograph taken on the moon,
featuring I, quaint blip,

feinted relic ’mid dim reverberations
e.g. ghost in portalled tomb
whose blundered destination

15

plunges on — old death throes
rattle in the deep,

where the dice cup heaves up sleep I’m leaving.

Denizens, sensitive as always, I remain
captain of the spaceship

“Isle of Destolation”
creepily dotted about my photo — where it roams,
approximations of despair breathing malice

pass by in the wake of an interest
I no longer maintain, who fondly recall
how to comb myself and shave my hair
and park my coat and hat in the hall.
Sincerely I resemble all those
who have written to me with letters of condolence,
whether edifice or orifice, bit or whole.
“Though alien drones and foreign hums
within me thrive …”
strange feeling of sudden distinction was creeping upon me
convinced of its authenticity,

spurting up like a hideous gas
and the whole mass imploding
into its own brief fumes.

Oddly,
I began my radio career
as a swarm of bees.

16

Some still speak of it
and I go on and on about it,
as befits my condition.

For example, this transmission explains
why someone of approximately my own

age and intelligence suddenly
led me across the large laboratory,
Firkon, Zuhl and the others all following.
Frankly I could have disintegrated
in a pilot’s suit of the same style

“whereby hangs
an immense bridge”
chomping away at the background

as we reached the platform.
Firkon suggested looking down into the elevator shaft

“Notice anything?”
and when I did, saw three
more floors or deck
levels below.

“At each level
a bridge or balcony …”

projected into the shaft contra-indicating the gap

dome of saucer between

“analogy of the abyss”

and his tautology

hovered outrageously above it.

17

“We use rudder-post technology to detach the post and
reinsert it on a short staff carried by a frame —

Welcome, 260 thousand cubic centimetres.”

At once, I clambered aboard and found
that taste of his butthole strangely hypnotic
whine of the motor gained in pitch like a twanging ’cello string.

Spike took up the “How long must I wait? I mean — ”
…
A tremor ran through the hull of the Moonraker…
A pencil fell from the instrument ta …

“I — I’m not sure …
Always together in this darned silence,

midground hard to determine between

both and neither,
column and house.”

(I could see right away what these things had in common:
they were all crap. I decided to demonstrate this

by tying strings between various objects.)

“My first
close-up

shot of the moon
filled me with cold foreboding”
— i.e.
stillness, a lack
of “Thank you”

18

amid the harsh glare of remnants,
bright greys and sooty

blacks,

the jagged,
razor-sharp outlines of the crags —

and no living thing but me,
crater.

“I? But I am an expert! I have so much to discover!
My ‘shallow cell’ theory — ”

a twelve-foot cylinder mounted on two
pairs of caterpillar tracks

glanced to the left, in the direction of the pit.
From this I could disappear into a narrow, walled valley several miles away.
Suddenly,

there I was, ethereal vapour
trails cut deep between the intermittent static

dispatched amid stygian fumes
his only glue
then split.

19