Shearsman 62: Peter Boyle: 2 Poems

Shearsman 62

Peter Boyle

Two Poems Without a Name

(17/4/04)

The strange sisters speak to us,
that they are lonely as we are —
all invisible
and breathing in the same quiet,
numbering the same stars.
We wanted to dwell in the future — a water-stained substitute
for the hard earth, the three a.m. chill
of damp grass under elms.
Insignificant things have travelled best.
You gave me a miniature rainforest as a present.
In its small brown pot
I watered it and clipped its canopy.
When the sky disappears beyond its
gnomic and intricately referenced leaves,
I will remember your face
and all its tenderness.
Everything you gave is alive somewhere.
In a world of strident crows
it whispers its litany.
Though I can enumerate nothing
it says, "I am what sustains you.
I am the everlasting catalogue."

(18/4/04)

Sometimes you have to follow strangeness back to its lair.
The furniture provides limited clues
as do the children
growing into altered versions of yourself but with
a withering refusal to endorse your chosen dead-ends.
If not the bric-à-brac what is it you've accumulated?
And what is this debt you've clocked up
pauperizing you for 25 years after your death?
At least you robbed your own inheritance.
At least you didn't have to blow anyone up
to put water into your bathtub.
Of the future's future less than five minutes is visible,
a haze where loss and guilt merge into green rolling vistas.
Dozo, the Japanese version keeps saying,
dozo, kono hon wa otonyo no skyblaetter desu.
An immense light glows where the words vanish.
Writing in effortless abandon
as befits the last days
of a warrior hermit gone to seed,
this at last could be the true life.

Peter Boyle is an Australian poet living in Sydney. He has published four collections of poetry in Australia: Coming home from the world (1994), The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997), What the painter saw in our faces (2001) and Museum of Space (2004). His translations of French and Spanish are widely published and his most recent book as a translator is The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004).