3/2/2012

Feb 01, 2012

You have found a way to write about me using only words that hold all things up to be gazed at from the outside. Words that belong in travel documents and phone books, in government legislation, flight protocols, codices for the handling of rare plants or service manuals for the elimination of the past. This is how it has to be, I understand. Narratives of the transforming self have had their day. Intentions and inwardness flicker out like a box of wires and a sputtering headlamp left out in the night rain. It is the brutal age of the limited exhibit—pinned, classified and left to deal with it. The sea has been erased from the crab’s memory. For now shells and fossils still speak. Vast creatures have moved through me and scamper into other trees.

Peter Boyle is an Australian poet living in Sydney. He has published ve collections of poetry, including Apocrypha in 2009. A new and selected of his poetry Towns in the Great Desert is due out later this year.