Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume One
November- December 2025
The Wide Starless Silence, poems by Peter Boyle.
From The Wide Starless Silence, a sequence of 65 poems.
1
Because the sky does not always fall
evenly on the earth
I have made for you this shelter of words.
May it ward off destruction,
may it catch the filtered traces of joy
life sprinkles on your fingertips and eyelids.
Because trees and stones have never been
our only building blocks
and walking was once a poor cousin
to the focussed mind’s
steady flight into the ether.
And yet and yet
a sincere stammer
may go further than all words
loving is also a way to make poetry.[1]
7
I drive the double-decker bus
up to the river of sadness.
The streets are familiar but the line of wooden wharves
has changed. And I don’t know
why so many people have climbed
on board my private bus.
And now I must search for the ticket
to this streamlined car-ferry
that by some strange operatic pun
bears the name Carmen.
Standing on the observation deck, keys in hand,
I can just make out the river’s far side —
a trailing line of rooftops and city spires
barely readable on the horizon’s edge.
Has it come to this: that I was always
some sort of intergenerational
transport driver, here only
to ferry others across time?
And now the tasks and the horizon blur,
postponed beyond postponement
water flows — and no one asks it
‘How do you flow? [2]
33
The night inside the night has the colour of straw.
Very gently it combs your face, enters your nostrils,
trails its fingers over your eyelids.
It’s clear that much of what is here you bring yourself
but there are others here as well and others’ voices.
You can sense them starting to speak
in the numb soles of your feet,
the emptiness of your hands.
Or they come towards you as long-ago people
seen once in childhood on a vanishing railway platform,
snatched away by the miracle of a departure
that instantly erases all that it leaves.
They can be heard in the hammering of old pipes
or the high-pitched monosyllables of birds
and you follow them down tunnels
of the straw-coloured night.
In the luminous blackness that settles on all sides,
writing your name on the stones,
writing your name on the sky,
it was time to begin but you were still
in transit, moving gracefully
through waterlily ponds between sandstone escarpments,
imagining you could run alongside yourself
cheering encouragement over the brink of night.
As if your one escape was to live always in fast-forward
but the night inside the night
takes a lifetime to understand
and you wake so few times inside it,
bereft of all light, all past or future,
space and time sealed off,
groping your way
to a loneliness that is also
its own kind of beauty,
the opening of a dimension that can’t
ever be closed again.[3]
62
Winter leans over the flattened scalp of the earth.
A voice is crooning a circular song:
‘Spirit seeks the bride of the north,
seeks the bride of the south.
There’s a heavy fig in the bag you carry —
do not tarry.’
My double, a bewildered giant, leans in;
his face, a flesh-balloon on fire,
fills the window of my micro-house.
Light is pouring from my hands
even as I hug myself small
to squeeze through the final door.
The body is a circular story.
It wants to be carried through,
asleep but open-eyed, warmly wrapped
in a carriage that glides, light
glinting off roofs and lakes,
familiar landscapes of trees and skies, the lips
whispering ‘One more time’.
Spirit knows only now, the extended
single moment of leaving, precise but vague,
a brief shining knife-point at the heart of the ice.
Beyond, rose-fingered streaks
ripple a corner in the sky’s distant mirror —
and the spirit
limitless in one go, the illusion of breath [4]
unravelling. No need to be here twice.
1 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable.
Translated by Carolyn Abbate, Princeton University Press, p. 99.
2 Gennady Aygi, poem 27 from “Thirty-six Variations on Themes
from Chuvash and Tatar Folk-Songs”.
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p196:
‘ouverture d’une dimension qui ne pourra plus être refermée”. My translation.
4 Anna Akhmatova translated by Paul Magee “Three Autumns”.
© Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle has published eleven books of poetry, including Ghostspeaking (Vagabond, 2016) and Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness (Vagabond, 2019). His most recent collection is Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions (Vagabond, 2024). His awards include the New South Wales Premier’s Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Prize and the South Australian Festival Award. He is a translator of poetry from French and Spanish with nine books of translation published, including poetry by José Kozer, Marosa Di Giorgio, Olga Orozco and Eugenio Montejo. He has published two collaborative books with Queensland poet MTC Cronin, most recently Who Was (Puncher and Wattmann, 2023). After many years working as a teacher with TAFE, he completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University. Peter lives and works on Dharug land.