Shearsman 58: Peter Boyle: "The Philosopher of Leopards"

Shearsman 58

Peter Boyle

The Philosopher of Leopards

"Peacocks flutter in autumn.
They have lost the will to migrate."
(Shen Shen, philosopher of leopards, 3003)

Why is a child's ear like a carhorn?
Why are toes always too heavy for the journey?
Forever ahead of every shadow
the philosopher of leopards has no names.
To her even adjectives are insufficient,
not yet truly fleeting (those niggardly noun-huggers!)
Verbs trouble her deeply –
their imposed repetitions,
all those runnings and jumpings and glidings.

She has restricted herself to the classic languages
consisting only of "buts" and "wells".
There the subtlety of a gaze,
the sadness of a hand that has given up on gesturing
could best approximate her texts.

The philosopher of leopards does not translate.
It does not matter to her
that the Japanese version said "what. . . what . . . what",
the Persian "now. . . now. . . now",
the Polish "and yet. . . and yet. . . and yet"
so long as they got the intonation right.

The leopard is the landscape without holes,
the hand blurred by the foot's arrival,
the spots that are the snow
that was the sky.
Disappearance is all.

Peter Boyle is an Australian poet living in Sydney. His three collections of poetry Coming home from the world (1994), The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997), and What the painter saw in our faces (2001) have received several awards, including the New South Wales Premier's Award, the South Australian Festival award and the National Book Council Award. Forthcoming this year from the University of Queensland Press is his latest collection Museum of Space. His next book as a translator is The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo, due shortly from Salt Publishing, Cambridge.