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.

*****

Stephen Edgar writes: “As the reader may guess, although the poem is cast in the third person, in the figure of a young boy, it describes a visit to an aquarium that I made myself, and as an adult. And on the occasion of this visit I was struck, and deeply impressed, by the single large Murray cod, seemingly floating motionless in its large room-sized tank of water, designed to mimic a section of the Murray River. Impressed in what way? Well, it is hard to say, but there seemed to be a certain mystery and power embodied in this fish, which was sealed off from me, inaccessible. The image stayed with me. However, it was only when I revisited the aquarium some years later that this original mood was reawakened and prompted me to write a poem about it. 

“The challenge was to find the right way to express it.  I didn’t want the poem to seem too portentous and self-important, so I thought that by seeing it through the eyes of a young boy I could give it a certain lightness of touch. But also the young are often considered to be more in touch with the natural world than adults, with their worldly preoccupations. In the midst of all the other superficially more attractive and appealing creatures in the aquarium, this particular boy is transfixed by this large fish. He has, I suppose you could say, a vision. What of? Well, some kind of vision of timelessness and continuity represented in nature, in comparison with which the speed and hubbub of daily life—represented by the city traffic and crowds—seem trivial and unimportant.

“In a way, the poem is already over by the end of the fourth stanza. The main point has been made. But a poem has an aesthetic shape as well as a meaning and I felt the need to round it off in some emotionally satisfying way. So I placed the boy, after the day was over and he was home again, lying in bed reliving his vision. Maybe he is dreaming; maybe he is awake and having a waking dream: either way he sees the fish in the midst of his ordinary everyday room, and overlaid on this he sees the city scenes, which are gradually absorbed by the dream river and dream fish. 

“The word “dreaming” in the poem’s title, while it can refer to this last stanza, is also meant to imply the use of the word in indigenous Australian culture, signifying a body of lore connected to a totemic animal or sacred place.

“The poem is written in a nonce stanza form of my own devising, with nine lines rhyming ABACDCBDB, in pentameter, apart from line one in dimeter, and lines four and eight in trimeter.

“The poem first appeared in Poetry (Chicago). It then appeared in The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (Fort Worth, Baskerville Publishers, 2012), now out of print; then in my ninth book, Eldershaw; and also in The Strangest Place.”

*****

Stephen Edgar was born in 1951 in Sydney, where he grew up. From 1971 to 1974 he lived in London and travelled in Europe. On returning to Australia he moved with his then partner to Hobart, Tasmania, where he attended university, reading Classics, and later working in libraries. Although he had begun writing poetry while still at high school, it was in Hobart that he first began writing publishable poems and found his distinctive voice. He became poetry editor of Island Magazine from 1989 to 2004. He returned to Sydney in 2005. He is married to the poet Judith Beveridge.

He has published thirteen full collections: Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground(2003), Other Summers (2006), History of the Day (2006), The Red Sea: New and Selected Poems (2012), Eldershaw (2013), Exhibits of the Sun (2014), Transparencies (2017), The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems (2020) and Ghosts of Paradise (2023). A small chapbook, Midnight to Dawn, came out in 2025, and a new collection, Imaginary Archive,will be published in late 2025. His website is www.stephenedgar.com.au, on which publication details of his books, and where they can be purchased, are given.

He was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2021 for The Strangest Place.

Photo: “Murray Cod at Melbourne Aquarium” by brittgow is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.