Peter Boyle Poems

At the front of our house is dawn
and the mist of the sea that enters our valley.

On tree-branches
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In the feast laid out at Alcibiades’ house Terpander posed for us the question, “Why is it that time flows backwards?” Discussion continued on this topic for a while till the much-travelled Timon broadened our understanding with his
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In Africa not far south of Kitezh, only a few days journey from Ebtesum, in several rich and spacious valleys can be found the most beautiful language on earth. The sounds of this language so enchant all who hear them, the rapture is
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By morning
three women, an old man
with a cart, two children.
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In Kitezh and the kingdoms nearby, though they know of stone and timber and partly use them as conditions require, they prefer to build with water. The most prized houses employ three or more interwoven waterfalls for their walls
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In those long periods when books vanished, when memory was the only way to record that the earth went back to the time (almost legendary) of one’s parents, when it seemed possible that cities and roads, villas, harbours and fleets,
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It is easy to believe there is another language always present at the edge of hearing, some slight, altogether bewildering shift in what we thought the finite reality called music, a colour no one has seen yet, familiar perhaps to
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At fifty I will begin my count towards the infinite numbers.

At negative ninety nine I will start my walk towards
the infinitessimally small.
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When you wake again
the donkey will be standing idly in the road,
the old man will open his shop,
the seagulls will tread critically
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Examine the candidate’s state of mind
as he inscribed the answers to all of the above
and estimate the temperature of his brain cells
as he lay awake in the cubicle at night
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