Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle was born in Melbourne (1951).
He moved to Sydney with his family in 1961 and has traveled extensively
in Asia and Europe. He now lives in
Sydney with his wife and two children.
He studied Arts at the University of Sydney, has an MA in Spanish and Latin
American Studies. Boyle has worked as a
teacher of English, History and Communications in high schools and in
TAFE. His first book of poetry, Coming
home from the world, won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award
(1995) as well as the National Book Council ‘Banjo’ Award. A second book, The Blue Cloud of Crying,
also won the ‘Banjo’ Award and the South Australia Festival Award for
Literature (1998). His poems and articles on poetry have appeared in numerous
magazines including Verse (USA), Poetry Review (UK), Poetry (USA),
La Traductiere (France), Revista Casa de Silva (Colombia), HEAT,
Southerly, Imago and Salt. He has translated extensively from French and Spanish poets,
notably Lorca, Vallejo, Eugenio Montejo and Pierre Reverdy. His translations
have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boxkite, HEAT, Southerly
and Varuna New Poetry.
Publications
Coming home from the world Five Islands Press 1994
The Blue Cloud of Crying Hale & Iremonger 1997
I am going to speak of hope Peruvian Consulate Sydney 1999
(Translation of Cesar Vallejo’s poems)
Acceptance of Silent Water Vagabond Press 2000
(pamphlet) (mike.brennan@rocketmail.com)
What the painter saw in our faces Five Islands Press
forthcoming August 2001
Anthologies
Contemporary Australian Poetry: An Anthology Houghton Mifflin 1990
(ed. John Leonard)
Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology Oxford University Press 1998
(ed. John Leonard)
Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1999
(ed. John Kinsella)
Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets
(eds. Michael Brennan & Peter Minter) Paper Bark Press 2000
New Music: Contemporary Poetry
(ed. John Leonard) Five Islands Press
forthcoming April 2001
POEMS
Separation
You in the high-walled fortress of sleep
I on an island of wakefulness:
bird-haunted, trapped by mist
You eyeing the warm milk of suspicion
I drinking the green rain of the seagull's ocean
You on the red deck of the last ferry going under
I on the amusement pier lost in the crowd
You going forward into the mirror
I crawling backward into the tooth's cavity
You in sunglasses
walking towards the sea on a street that backs into the sun
I sliding on ice across the abandoned freeway
You in prison waiting for redemption
I in the asylum counting billiard balls
You climbing stairways, humping buckets of soapy fisheyes
I descending the silver elevators, escorted by clouds
You on the night bus that leaves from the ferry wharf and goes
across the stone desert to the other side of the earth
I on the top floor of the brightly lit hospital,
beating the glass with my hands
The night is cold
The poplars are grey in the headlights
You have opened the paragraph of silence
I was closing the volume of inaudible sound.
Robert Frost at
eighty
I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known.
I would like to find them.
They are not on the greying paper of old books
or chanted on obscure lips.
They are not in the language of mermaids
or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing.
They run like torn threads along paving stones.
They are cracked as the skull of an old man.
They stir in the mirror
at fifty,
at eighty.
My ear keeps trying to hear them
but the seafront is cold.
The tide moves in.
They migrate like crows at a cricket ground.
They knock at the door when I am out.
I have done with craft.
How can I front ghosts with cleverness,
the slick glide of paradox and rhyme
that transforms prejudice
to brittle gems of seeming wisdom?
Though I bury all I own or hold close
though my skin outlives the trees
though the lines fall shattering the stone
I cannot catch them.
They have the lilting accent
of a house I saw but never entered.
They are the sounds a child hears -
the water, the afternoon, the sky.
I watch them now
trickling through the open mirror.
Sometimes, but almost never
we touch what we desire.
Marriage
The fish around us are wide and lonely.
They do not have your eyes.
A single trail of bubbles
lifts your thoughts
towards the bright rim of survival.
Up there a mouth as beautiful as yours
smears my lips with seaweed.
In the tangled meshing of sleepiness
I could extend my arm
to push us both towards
whatever normality broken surfaces bring.
I'm not sure
if your breath can carry mine
and though I hold you
I always dream of letting go.
I tell myself the light in your window
is not the light of heaven
but the fish have swum into the room
and in this circle of the cosmos
shining voices resonate
in old tins as they drift
downward to the ocean's private dosshouse.
Too late to be anywhere else.
My hand and yours are almost the same size.
Justine
Learning to whisper in borrowed voice, Hold me,
the slightly retarded patient out on leave
is guided up the brothel stairs again.
An older woman wised up beyond bourbon,
she fingers with her eyes
the cracked stubble round a shrunken cock.
In this waiting room where a giant phallus mocks TV chatter,
women weave pain into desperate smoke.
Upstairs in the discard bin
the sticky rubber gleams back
a life's anguished tenderness.
In stark white garments in the blue room
she licks the tears from his eyes,
she brushes against the wasted frame of bones.
In this room ravaged by neon
achingly she soothes down
his longing for life.
Now in the white ward over that grey hair
there wander the stooped vague eyes of unpicking.
She wakes one morning.
"Nurse", she says," I can't walk anymore"
and the long earth of paralysis moves up her side.
In that other room years before
coming and letting come
for the sixth, the tenth client of the night
giving herself, giving all of herself,
the bruised eye, the soft hand.
He cries into her side
lying together
as lovers bathed in fake blue light
while the white ghost of neon on the wall outside
pulses its commentary.
She unzippers and strokes his lonely anguish.
On a fine chain at her neck
hangs an obelisk out of Egypt
given one night by a truck driver,
dead drunk and garrulous,
blinded by old angers
yet sensing this need of a token.
"Do you want me?" she says
reaching out to steady me-
for who else would be writing this?-
and the stairs creak again a first time
under us.
It is the first giving.
I note the charm at her neck,
her borrowed name,
the white peaks of her breasts healing me.
A lifetime of giving
deserves heaven, if there is heaven -
if not some prayer to shape such
longing for the light.
Four Voices for a
Century
1. Rilke in Paris (1902)
"I am learning to see":
long dark streets, a certain wall,
the intestines of houses left open to the sky,
pipes hanging like disconnected throats.
Hours spent in the hospital,
a face among all the faces,
watching the play of sunlight on a wall.
When later I sought to explain my predicament to the doctors
the phrases learned off so carefully
all turned into birds
pecking and banging wildly
against the window.
Asked to wait once again
I caught the smell of electricity poured
into people's heads,
then fled a long way down tunnels,
to wake on an embankment
facing the deep quiet of the Seine.
I have seen more:
a troop of madmen holding hands
as they enter the clinic,
old lottery selling women
whose toothless mouths
suck and slather,
a family of acrobats setting up for their performance
on a path through the Luxembourg gardens.
Above all,
the blind man on the bridge,
so grey and worn and forgotten
like a chalked stone on some long disused road.
He had about him a frayed cloak marked by
what I took to be stars.
As he tapped his way through the crowd:
I saw in him a powerless judge
bringing the world to a halt.
And beyond all seeing
invisible roads carrying me
to the edge of breakdown.
Some twilight from a high window
a tear that stretched
across skies, across years.
Meeting the truth of hands:
my own hand among all the hands,
going out, losing itself, becoming indistinguishable,
and then ( my pen does an ellipse
of shame as I write this )
the pure moment of horror of others,
of disappearing forever among them,
of their skin and their smell
and of quiet anonymous deaths.
So I walk each day across this town
as in an evil wood without end.
For when the forests of Europe were felled
the wolves and the fears fled into the cities
like the secret leer in the handcrafted woodwork in Nuremburg
or the goblins, the dark duendes,
that conceal themselves in the corners of great cathedrals
as in the Kölnischer Dom.
At times it is as if I could touch the coming horror
and then it is all inside me
but without words
as I stood the first time
before Rodin's Portals of Hell.
For the moment I seek to grow and be worthy.
"I live on vegetables where possible
to be close to what is simple"
and alone without wine in this city of dying laughter
I seek to grow clear and invisible.
To be empty and whole.
To be the road of a single journey.
To be
only expression.
2. Hitler in Vienna (1910)
I write these notes because I do not yet know what myth I want to
construct.
I am learning to hate,
this above all,
am learning the science and exact measure
of how others hate, how hate is transmitted.
I am seeing behind the faces
seeing so accurately
how this animal, the city, is put together.
There is in all this a form behind surfaces
a formula I can almost name.
I believe I am touching truth, not truth as others have known it
the truth of the past
but future truth.
I see men and women moving around
believing this is the past
still 1850
tea on the balcony
a stage-set managed by families with names.
Yet a new earth is present in the eyes of the very poor, the outsiders,
all those seeking work
and the beautiful anonymous thugs I will one day use.
I know I must harness my strength.
I live almost entirely on vegetables
and avoid all alcohol.
I seek the sharpest concentration
to realise what I know is inside me.
In the bars and on benches
I see men crumpled by life
and at times I have stood transfixed
by horror of others, of their skin and their smell.
I have discovered
I think you could call it terror
of all those for whom life
is one long anonymous death.
So I walk each day across this town
as in an evil wood without end
and I seek out the ones to blame.
I let the voices inside me
dictate the ones (so, so many )
to hate.
Above all I despise the assertion of values.
Shifting from room to room
to confuse the authorities, to avoid Militärdienst
in this polyglot mess of an Empire,
today when required to fill in my occupation
I put 'writer'
yet in truth I may be the supreme anti-poet
for I feel in myself no inside,
no space out of which to address words that might be
any more than steps towards
other advantages.
(Even as I write this
I whisper through my teeth
'every word is a ploy'.)
And I say
the earth is open for
the one who will seize it.
3. Thomas Merton in Bangkok (1968)
Outside this hardened glass window
is all of Asia.
I have been out there all day
sweating and chilled
in a conference with monks.
Here just a few hundred miles from
the burning fields of Vietnam
remembering (is it dream or memory?)
the flight out of Japan
inside the jaws of a bomber
falling asleep on the hatch
dream of being sprayed out along with napalm over the rice fields.
Memories of my last night in Japan
flags tied to small barges on the river,
little peace offerings floating
along a river corrected by concrete.
Remembering my friend, the young novice from Nicaragua,
who taught me the lovely old poem of Jorge Manrique
"Nuestras vidas son los ríos. . ."
and yesterday exhausted,
watching the enormous sermon of mud
flowing in afternoon heat through the city of Bangkok,
the great brown river-god
laden with ferries, barges and silent old tankers,
the tall spires of oil burning by day and by night
on the city skyline.
What is this world outside the window to me?
Gestures and glances I cannot read.
In this city of millions
reduced to an ageing man
who wanders lost
as in an evil wood without end,
my eyes drink heat and petrol,
drink slowly the heavy sky,
that coffin lid.
Even as I miss
the contemplative quiet of Kentucky
I feel I have never understood prayer,
the one power I have in this darkness.
I would like to simplify my life,
to live entirely on vegetables, to keep the mind unclouded
to let the voices inside and outside me
heal and speak praise.
The heat of the day steaming over,
I head for the shower.
Time later to try out the portable fan
that sits looking battered
in its own due corner.
4. Child on Smoky Mountain, Manila
He eyes the fishbones.
An elemental hush in the collection of junk.
He strips bare the husk of tape
from a broken cassette.
The drowned automobile is striking roots.
No matter how thin the poet
wants to get
his lines
they will never be as thin
as this
child's
wrist.
The mountain of refuse is the magic mountain
of the ending.
It is not words or dogmas
not beliefs or passions
we fight for now-
only gnarled raw things:
a doorhandle, the rusted shoulder of a car,
a shrivelled stalk of some stripped weed
as lean as
the stick legs of the grey unshaven
males behind the wire
on a hillside in Bosnia.
The hot twisting wind
is the mountain's ear to this earth.
In the refuse pile
a shoe without heel or sole
stumbles forward.
The boy searching for food
grazes the edge of a dead pipe,
its cylindrical ache for water
now filling with mud and fishbones.
With the fragrant smoke
above the jeepney fumes, above the brown haze
of this colonial city
silting up with a life it cannot feed,
this is everyone's cemetery.
On Smoky Mountain
the gulls perch.
Blown batteries leak their blue stain.
In shunting yards
slow trains grind their cargo
of foodstuffs for Japan.
Tinned and perfectly segmented pineapples
creak down towards the docks.
Lachrymose as angels
children drift across the refuse, a face mask over mouth and eyes,
the extraordinary heat of the tropics
crawling across shoulders that
never quite rise above the stench
like a swimmer whose lips
graze the crust of salt.
While just beyond them
the thin river trickles down
to Manila Bay.
Notes
l 1 "I am learning to see" R.M.Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, translated by M.D. Herter Norton ( W.W.Norton), p 14.
l 55,56 "I live on vegetables . ." Letter to Ellen Key, 3 April 1903,
Letters of R.M.Rilke (Vol 1), (W.W.Norton), p 103.
At
the centre of our lives
Sometimes all the photographs in a room
turn suddenly empty.
Only the houses remain, a few trees,
the desks where people sat
or maybe an umbrella is there
still shading the meal everyone has left.
So tonight there is so much absence in love
when even your laughter is the poetry of pain
as you straighten the collar of the man who was once your husband
as a small boy tries to bearhug the doomed shoulders of a father.
Tonight we walk so carefully around each other's absences
and we each carry not just a ghost
but enough space for a family of ghosts,
enough loneliness, enough death.
Tonight once more you are tucking your two children into bed.
Leaning your face against your daughter's,
your kisses flutter down across her forehead.
Trawling gently beneath your son's wayward smiles
your eyes read
the pain contours shimmering there,
his own private lost continent.
As night slowly extends across the garden
and the moon brightens,
that great white stone above the hills
becoming our one common lantern,
your face softens in the glow of other stars,
your shadow an open silent tree that gathers the horizon
in which your children sleep.
For me here
so many hundred miles away from your quiet breathing
old photos ring me like a chain of loyalties.
I wear my many loves like difficult jewels
that gash and bruise my cheek while I sleep
in a room where I am always
alone before this small shrine to what is lost.
How learn an honest tenderness to kiss goodbye?
You stand there in the hallway watching your children sleep,
your face taut and ravaged from carrying so much emptiness
from room to room,
smoothing down blankets, folding clothes.
And for me who always imagined myself holding you,
loving you,
it's as if your simplest presence is saying
"Which of us ever knows the first thing about love,
the first thing about letting go?"
And today we are putting on smiles
as if we don't all walk around
with great unnamed holes through the centre of ourselves,
busily painting the sun on others' ceilings
to warm the beginnings of their lives.
Paralysis
( 1955 )
Laid out flat
in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed
I look up:
the leaves are immense,
green and golden with clear summer light
breaking through -
though I turn only my neck
I can see all of them
along this avenue that has no limits.
What does it matter
that I am only eyes
if I am to be carried
so lightly
under the trees of the world?
From beyond the numbness of my strange body
the wealth of the leaves
falls forever
into my small still watching.
In
the small hours
It's three a.m. in the morning
of a day you won't enter for so many hours.
Where you are
yesterday's sunlight still bathes your feet as you walk
and tonight hearing your voice
I worried that one day
I'll lose my images of all those I love.
Outside the city's still restless:
taxis alert and shiny as golden birds
waiting for the crumbs of dawn.
At fifty five I know so little how to live.
In cafes across this city
lovers still hold hands
and cups balance on the edges of tables.
Darkness falls around me like soft snow.
Beside the narrow bed
my night light is staring right into me.
I will hold your voice inside me as long as I can.
When I sleep you'll go on walking
through a steady explosion of white flowers.
Missing
Words
I don't know how many things there are in this world that have no name.
The soft inner side of the elbow, webbed skin between the fingers, a day
that wanders out beyond the tidal limits and no longer knows how to
summon the moon it has lost, my firstborn who gazes about himself when
the TV dies and there is a strange absence in his world. I was looking
for a great encyclopaedia, the secret dictionary of all the missing
words. I wanted to consult its index and find out what I could have
become. The sound the clock makes when it is disconnected and taken down
from the wall but can't lose the habit of trying to jerk itself forward.
The look of old socks drying on a rack in the kitchen all through a
winter night, hanging starched and sad opposite the wedding photographs.
A word for your face when you know you can't love but would almost like
to try.The blurred point of merger between fresh storm damage to a house
and the deep fissures that have always been there. Walking down the
corridor to the front door with inexplicable elation in my chest as if
everything was about to start, as if my love had just arrived, escaped
from a burning world, and at the same time clenched in my taut wrists,
my hands, the thin bones of my arms, the certainty that everything has
long been over.
Group portrait,
Delft, late sixteenth century
They opened the dikes five times that year to flood the land.
Cities were torched, the inhabitants bound and gagged,
then forced at lancepoint into the frozen canals.
I was executing yet another portrait of the public trustees of an
orphanage
that their bald correctly-laced presences might shine
in remote museums a thousand years hence.
I enjoy the delicate way their hands rest on the title deeds
for these most Christian places
even as the order "No prisoners" passed along both sides
or another cannonade ripped through the munitions factory
burying in rubble the girls' school for genteel deportment.
Each year the orphanages increased.
The portraits grew heavier and heavier.
The regents must have thought they would lug the weight of them
into the other world.
Nice money if you can get the work
and no one questioned motives:
fidelity to realistic details
right up to the end of the earth.
These stone embankments that look like Venice but they're not Venice,
here where the dark river finds its terminus,
where the ship's prow seeks a tomb among the currents.
Every day, as I paint,
winter water shivers under the footbridge.
The gaunt trees shelter their starved layer of birds:
at each level they define a new habitation.
I once captured the local birds in a biblical triptych:
those rounded brutal mouths shaped by the one cry of begging,
stuffing everything visible into their darkening crevasse.
I wanted to paint as bluntly
as words spoken during an avalanche
yet all's this inevitable smooth,
these muted blues that are the fashion of the age
recording everything precisely as it is:
each official, each battle, the newborn child,
the fruits on the table, the windmill on the hillside to the left
at every change of season -
that's what they wanted and I could do it,
making present to the touch
each thing as it passes into amnesia.
Today at the abandoned Cathedral
the Italian master continues his rehearsals.
No one notices how there's a wobbling at the core of his music
and no matter how high the dancers kick their heels
they will never find solid ground.
The goodly burghers will follow the streamers
and no one thinks twice of the five servant girls
penned in their cages
awaiting the sentence of beheading
for certain lewd practices
as reported by their illustrious employers.
Each day the ocean grows outside the dike.
The wounds in the sky slowly multiply.
Ever more threatening the viking ships come closer.
I continue these stern faces, hands folded in laps,
apocalypse near Delft, the circle sealed.
Long needles knit the great-cloaks for our third winter in the trenches.
The troops of the Duke of Alba torch another outlying settlement
while the regents' faces betray no emotion.
They know the civilization I smear on this canvas will last a thousand
year