Peter Boyle

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.

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.

Seven years old, on loan to an uncle and a bundle of cash went missing. For three days locked in a room, beaten. The golden orbs of pennies roasted in an oven removed by tongs glisten on a child’s skin as she screams and screams. These round white scars that remain even today without pigment without the shadow of colour with only the ash’s afterglow. After telling that story you burnt your hand on the iron, burnt it yourself, your punishment for breaking silence. You rushed to the balcony but they pulled you back inside. You wanted to spit, to scream insults at the soldiers to stop them beating up the old man in the street. “Listen,” she said as she held you back, your mother. “Listen, you have to learn to say nothing.” Learn to be nobody. Learn to be the white wall that has no face and no tongue.