Peter Boyle – Three Poems

Boyle LE P&W February 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing February 2025

Three poems by Peter Boyle.


Responses 27

A light bulb in an empty warehouse
Two children entering the deep calm of a mountain lake
The metal crutch you use for walking
The clear space between a crowd of people that leads
your eyes to a tangle of saltbush gathering light
A shop sign in red and white against the brilliance
of midday
Keys dropped accidentally, still there in a neon-lit carpark
A beloved face that takes in all your being, enfolding
your body in the stillness of time dissolved
A pair of freshly polished boots beside a crumpled bed
Eyes that hold you, then turn away
A spoon left unused on a restaurant table
Winter light playing along the surface of a parked car
The dotted lines at the end of a lease and the empty spaces
in a marriage contract
Milk bottles in a long ago school playground
Tinned sardines and a can opener
Everything that shines
is saying farewell.[1]

[1] Héctor Hernández Montecinos, Teoría de la ficción <my translation>, p 52


Responses 42

It is slipping by,
the day that was his life,
among papers and anxieties, the blossoming
wounds of last night’s sky,
and close by, somehow intuited,
invisible uncles, Melchior and Baltasar,
mumbling on the front porch, penniless
as stars.

It slips by, the endless childhood hours,
mother’s elegant earrings,
father’s silences, girls
whose soft faces
translated the sea

and the bright yellow
alertness of flowers in window vases
or the stretch of all that unfolded so inexplicably
beyond the ever opening sequence
of windows.

A clear measure of sweetness
trembles on the kitchen counter —
warm tea.

Having long since given up
on waiting for speech to come
he steps out
into the extraordinary height and depth
of a single moment.

True being is everywhere
an ideal goal, a task. [2]

[2] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 13.


Responses 57

In the cool room of crystals
a woman stoops to tap a scalpel
against the brimming water.
Outside, a cobbled street
takes you by the hand
down through a twilight maze of old warehouses
to the harbour’s swaying presence.
White scratch marks on a stone marker
record the last spring tide’s
date and time.

Who will plunge into these cold waters
to surface freed of their past?
The ocean filters so much of our lives away
yet the grit at our core goes on hardening
into a small semi-precious stone.
Out of the infinite
paucity of human language
we might call it sadness.
Nevertheless, and ever so precariously,
it glows. Dislodged slightly
from the dogmatist’s web
of this or that, of fixed becoming —
not fate but a kind of fête,
a celebration[3].

[3] Vladimir Jankélévich, Music and the Ineffable, p. 66


© Peter Boyle

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