Peter Boyle Australia

Summer Day

(reading a Cuban poem while waiting at the pathologist)

Not words on a page
but an old man opposite me
who is whispering –
his life, the furniture, the stars,
the kitchen clatter, all
appear in the air around him as he talks,
this voice that touches each thing
to verify exactly where it stands.
The tropic sun is bright and all-consuming
inside and outside the poem.
It is quiet enough to recognise his voice quite clearly.
I too am dying.
Beyond the circle of his speech
one undivided silence sustains and engulfs me:
the summer sky, Cuba walking on across the page, my suspect blood.

Peter Boyle

Where the roads go after nightfall

Sometimes a road bends in darkness,
bends from the sheer weight of travelling
across the line into night.
The river hurled under you,
like a great doubt below bridges,
may be there or not.
The stars curve away
and all that life meant -
the naked sweetness of the sky -
disappears with the vanished signposts.
So still, the most distant hills
and the earth just in front of you are one.
You stand on a different path then
getting used to the empty sky
as it wraps itself about you,
getting used to the worm food,
to the blindness of walking without eyes.
The rush the dead must feel
bleeds suddenly into you
and the unimaginable grows inside you
as a fire can burn for years inside itself
giving out only darkness.

Lonelier worlds stretch endlessly out there:
your feet have taken their first step
into that space:
where the roads go after nightfall.

© Peter Boyle, Australia

Peter Boyle, (b. 1951) lives in Sydney. His first collection of poetry Coming Home from the World (1994) received the National Book Council Award. Other collections include The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997), What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001) and Museum of Space (2004). Boyle has read his poetry at festivals in Paris, Medellin, Caracas and Stuga. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, the UK, Singapore, China, France and other countries. He is also a translator of French and Spanish.