Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024
Responses, poems by Peter Boyle.
Responses 12.
On International Abandonment Day a green fly
patrols the artificial pink flowers
in their bowl on the restaurant table.
The view across the harbour is breathtaking.
The fly’s bands of green and luminous black
mimic the fake foliage underneath the flowers.
Paying its respects to this day
the sun steadily refuses to go down
as round the last lingering diners
waitresses stack chairs onto tables.
Like a sushi train winding its slow way round
the crenelated ceiling, a blinking line of red teletype
carries the ever-increasing numbers
of the year’s unmourned dead. Briefly, heroically,
they flash and chase each other
into oblivion. The book closes always
on a lost face.*
* Edmond Jabès, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion
<translated by Rosmarie Waldrop> p. 52
Responses 13.
My body seems to be whirling
as if I’ve travelled such enormous distances
to be here. As if I’m always a small child
pedalling up the unforgiving hill
to the house at the top of the sky.
The black house of many windows
where lightning twists and writhes
in purple dances.
And from around me into my hands
the circling winds drip leaves then water drops.
In a sudden flash an ocean with all the blue
of the planet enters my retina.
Dust specks from mountains that collapsed
millennia before my birth find their way
to the back of my throat. Not only with our mouths . . .
not only with our lungs and skin . . .
we eat the world.*
*Sergei Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy, p 102
Responses 41.
All the words long filtered out of my head
become legible for one moment
in the palms of my hands.
Walls pick up their stones and migrate inland.
Ponds fill with discarded tickets for the grand
disclosure of truth in the winter’s sky-palace
(postponed now to an undisclosed date.)
In the back garden a zigzagging line
marks the place where the earth suffered
a sudden terminal subsidence.
My father’s persistent ever-growing fear of sunset
at last finds its name.
Thumbs move slowly across the darkening lake-surface
formed by a thousand abandoned phones.
You add to the dreams of crutches and damaged wheelbarrows
by placing a pebble in the offertory box outside the Cathedral.
Bodies are stored in the chest cavity
of an old woman feeding birds
(there’s always room for one more.)
The olive salesman climbs down from his platform in the trees
and bicycles to a nearby village.
Seagulls have eaten the chocolate statue’s right arm.
Memories decay; wounds accumulate.
A small squat furnace sits on a pile of stones
to warm its brief portion of night.
Out of the wide starless silence
faces and claws come towards me
as I go on gathering matches.
The world is a wax museum
in the process of melting.*
* Héctor Hernández Montecinos, Teoría de la ficción
<my translation and adaptation>, p 43
© 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.