Poetry: Peter Boyle The Cryptic: Mungo MacCallum

6

It wasn’t the stars that frightened them. It was the stairs.

You could climb to the height of the sky but there were more than a thousand steps and each one took a year off your life – you would soon be lost in the time of your great-great-grandparents and before you knew it no one would speak your language.

You would be shovelling snow off a hillside and hunting for turnips, the unborn image of yourself spitting curses and alone in the fiery darkness.

Beneath the coal, light.

Beneath the mud of the road a child’s notebook filled with the letter A and a ballerina’s slipper.

9

The road went further down under the trees, under fences and slowly decaying houses, below high-voltage barriers and under purple fields of bracken and thistles. Entering the ocean, it continued unperturbed across sunken valleys where cattle once grazed, over the skeletons of abandoned shepherds’ huts, below the stone slabs of the drowned city.

And beneath the road of your waking breaths the road of not-seeing, not-moving, the well-paved royal road of sleep, and under sleep the road of spiralling dreams – and under that, the lone solitary road, a road with no one on it, the road where all the dreams of a lifetime, remembered, not remembered, fuse together, stretched out under the world’s inner sky. The long quiet space of the one flash of light that held you.

16

Around myself

I place a wall.

Inside the wall explosions, puffs of smoke, an island erupts between sea and sea, on one side the moon, on the other the sun, and in between a jagged row of mountains reveals an infinite anfractuosity of tiny loopings: a temple summons me to hold it in my hands with care.

Inside the wall infinity the size of an eggshell. Outside the wall immense darkness.

The planet moves in its slowly circling uncertainty.

Ferns tremble.

Lightning tears a hole in the dense summer air. Across a tilting twilight floor I carry a bowl that is empty.