An Origin Like Water

by Eavan Boland

  Ornaments which he, when night came,

  Unbound again with all a lover’s care,

  But in another royal life, of

  Which nothing remained only love.

  “O world,” cried Aengus, “I have found again

  My only love restored to loveliness

  For whom I interwove, to catch the sun,

  A bower of every blossom, fruit and grass

  In each material, from every season

  When she was changed by a Druid’s malice

  And watched her drink its dew and suck

  Its honey, and never realized our luck.

  “How can I kiss those red forgetful lips

  This unfamiliar hand, or take this body

  Which has traveled through so many shapes

  Of magic to my side? Can an unready

  Girl give back a woman? Can green pips

  Sweeten the tongue like fruit? Or seedy

  Grain be wholesome wheat overnight?

  And will I ever find again delight

  Which I have searched for in a thousand years?

  Invisible but none the less in pain

  And none the less a creature of my tears

  Crying at corners of the world ‘Etain’

  Without an answer? And now for all my loss

  I must begin to woo my love again.

  No arms await me and no recognition

  Only the chance to win again what’s mine.”

  Day by summer day Aengus stayed

  Beside the cool lake and watched his love

  Grow graceful as the forest deer which wade

  And drink at dawn, and saw her beauty thrive

  And knew she fretted. “She will be a bride

  Before the winter. She for whom I wove

  A shelter out of flowers will shelter now

  In other arms, and I have lost my labor.”

  Out of the south one day a horseman rode,

  His head the color of the harvest corn,

  His cloak full, jeweled and embroidered,

  A sword weighing at his side, a horn

  Curving at his shoulder. There he wooed

  Etain while Aengus watched, his heart torn

  In two, hearing his love say “Yes I will

  Give you love for love upon that hill.”

  Dawn broke after a fevered night

  In cold waves, wide as the sea is deep,

  Capsizing the half moon in tidal light,

  But Aengus threw his rival into a sleep

  As blind as death and by the dreadful right

  Of love, disguised himself within that shape

  And climbed the hill alone and there appeared

  To Etain as the lover she desired.

  All about them acorns and dried leaves

  Lay close as gold and silver at a feast,

  Friendly trees shaded them in groves

  And the sun rising was their priest—

  And even by the hours, usual thieves

  Of love, they knew that their embrace was blessed.

  And Aengus wept, half for simple joy,

  Half to be within another body.

  Knowing it as the necessary price

  Of his possession, yet he felt despair

  Because he spoke within another voice

  And kissed with strange lips Etain’s fair

  Lips. And knew that they were loving twice

  In two forms, yet with a single fire.

  “What would you say Etain if you should know

  I loved another woman long ago?”

  “My only love,” said Etain, “overhead

  Autumn is decking out the chestnut tree

  With embers. Our cheeks are pressed against dead

  Flowers and we have been lovers in a chilly

  Womb of snow. But spring will fling a vivid

  Color on this tree and make ready

  The world and with a same difference

  The heart can love again and yet love once.

  “Are buds less welcome to the April bough

  Because they open where all others have?

  Is snow less white, the wingspan of the crow

  Less black because their purities survive

  From past to future and from then to now?

  And so is any love not every love?”

  And with her words Aengus came to rest

  At last and slept safely on her breast.

  With many a trumpet, many a bell’s mouth

  Opened like a bird’s under the sun,

  Etain married Conor, King of the South,

  Imagining him the lover who had lain

  With her, ignorant of the strange truth.

  But very soon discovered to her pain

  Her heart was cold, pressed beneath a weight

  Like ice while her love turned to hate.

  Bitter words were woven into the stuff

  Of disappointment. “How can I say,” she cried,

  “Where love has gone. I loved you well enough

  That bold autumn morning on the hillside.”

  Then Conor turned to her, his speech rough:

  “I slept that dawn as though I had been dead.”

  And Etain’s heart stirred, her tears

  Fell on the stiff frost of a thousand years.

  The weather changed. Winter with its harsh

  Colors became spring. Flowers grew.

  A stilted crane waded in the marsh,

  An argosy of summer fruits blew

  Inland on the winds, wild and fresh.

  Etain only was unstirred by the view

  Of the earth waking, but sat alone sewing

  Always at her window, always waiting.

  Like January’s rose to one of June

  Her scarlet cheeks dwindled into white.

  Her round flesh almost into bone,

  The brilliance of her eye became a twilight.

  And as the green earth swelled great

  With child she sickened, separate and thin.

  May came and the trees were stirred

  By blossoms tumbling from their brief stations,

  Wrapping the flamboyant earth in a shroud

  Like snow, when Etain, sick with long patience

  Saw a figure like a far bird

  Enlarge at last and block the summer distance,

  And saw a horseman in a rich dress

  Drumming across the drawbridge of the palace.

  And he was armoured in a suit of seasons:

  Flowers of spring adorned his iron greaves;

  The icy evergreen, the berry’s poisons

  Enameled his wintry visor. Flushed leaves

  Of autumn inflamed his breast like suns

  And summer was imprinted on his sleeves

  And what with berry, leaf, tree and flower

  He seemed no horseman but a human bower.

  And where his lady’s token should have been

  A scarf of silk, marked in brilliant paints,

  Flapped wildly to the wind’s motion,

  On which a dragonfly, seeming at once

  To light on every flower, had been drawn.

  And Etain from her window knew the prince

  Was Aengus. And ran to him and took his arm

  And mounting up, rode away with him.

  I

  from

  The War Horse

  1975

  Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist

  (FOR KEVIN)

  I know you have a world I cannot share

  Where a woman waits for you, beautiful,

  Young no doubt, protected in your care

  From stiffening and wrinkling, not mortal

  Not shy of her own mirror. How can I rival

  Her when like another wife she waits

  To come into the pages of your novel,

  Obediently, as if to your bed on nights

  She is invited nor, as in your other life

  I do, reminds you dail
y of the defeat

  Of time nor, as does your other wife,

  Binds you to the married state?

  She is the other woman. I must share

  You with her time and time again,

  Book after book. Yet I am aware,

  Love, that I may have the better bargain:

  I imagine she has grown strange

  To you among the syntax and the sentences

  By which you distance her. And would exchange

  Her speaking part for any of our silences.

  The War Horse

  This dry night, nothing unusual

  About the clip, clop, casual

  Iron of his shoes as he stamps death

  Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth.

  I lift the window, watch the ambling feather

  Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether

  In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road,

  Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head

  Down. He is gone. No great harm is done.

  Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn

  Of distant interest like a maimed limb,

  Only a rose which now will never climb

  The stone of our house, expendable, a mere

  Line of defense against him, a volunteer

  You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head

  Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead.

  But we, we are safe, our unformed fear

  Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

  If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted

  Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated?

  He stumbles on like a rumor of war, huge

  Threatening. Neighbors use the subterfuge

  Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street

  Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait,

  Then to breathe relief lean on the sill

  And for a second only my blood is still

  With atavism. That rose he smashed frays

  Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days

  Of burned countryside, illicit braid:

  A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.

  The Famine Road

  “Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones

  these Irish, give them no coins at all; their bones

  need toil, their characters no less.” Trevelyan’s

  seal blooded the deal table. The Relief

  Committee deliberated: “Might it be safe,

  Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force

  from nowhere, going nowhere of course?”

  one out of every ten and then

  another third of those again

  women—in a case like yours.

  Sick, directionless they worked. Fork, stick

  were iron years away; after all could

  they not blood their knuckles on rock, suck

  April hailstones for water and for food?

  Why for that, cunning as housewives, each eyed—

  as if at a corner butcher—the other’s buttock.

  anything may have caused it, spores,

  a childhood accident; one sees

  day after day these mysteries.

  Dusk: they will work tomorrow without him.

  They know it and walk clear. He has become

  a typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although

  he shares it with some there. No more than snow

  attends its own flakes where they settle

  and melt, will they pray by his death rattle.

  You never will, never you know

  but take it well woman, grow

  your garden, keep house, good-bye.

  “It has gone better than we expected,Lord

  Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured

  in one. From parish to parish, field to field;

  the wretches work till they are quite worn,

  then fester by their work. We march the corn

  to the ships in peace. This Tuesday I saw bones

  out of my carriage window. Your servant Jones.”

  Barren, never to know the load

  of his child in you, what is your body

  now if not a famine road?

  Child of Our Time

  (FOR AENGUS)

  Yesterday I knew no lullaby

  But you have taught me overnight to order

  This song, which takes from your final cry

  Its tune, from your unreasoned end its reason;

  Its rhythm from the discord of your murder

  Its motive from the fact you cannot listen.

  We who should have known how to instruct

  With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep,

  Names for the animals you took to bed,

  Tales to distract, legends to protect

  Later an idiom for you to keep

  And living, learn, must learn from you dead,

  To make our broken images rebuild

  Themselves around your limbs, your broken

  Image, find for your sake whose life our idle

  Talk has cost, a new language. Child

  Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.

  Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

  17 May 1974

  On a child killed in the Dublin bombing

  The Hanging Judge

  Come to the country where justice is seen to be done.

  Done daily. Come to the country where

  Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw

  Boys are killed for it. Look, here

  We hanged our son. Our only son.

  And hang him still. And still we call it law.

  James Lynch Fitzstephen. Magistrate.

  First Citizen of Galway. 1493.

  Spanish merchant trader, his horror

  Of deceit a byword. A pillar of society.

  With one weakness, Walter, whose every trait

  Reversed his like a signature in a mirror.

  Torches splutter. The dancing, supple,

  Spanish-taught, starts. James Lynch Fitzstephen

  May disapprove but he, a man of principle,

  Recalls young Gomez is a guest in town,

  And the girl beside him, his son’s choice, may restore

  A new name and honor to his heir.

  Dawn. Gomez dead, in a wood. The Spanish heart

  Which softened to her rigid with the steel

  Of Walter Lynch’s blade. Wild justice there—

  Now to its restraint, but not repeal,

  He returns to Galway, friendless, to be met,

  In the city, by his father. In the stare

  Which passed slowly between them, a history

  Pauses: repression and rebellion, the scaffold

  And its songs, the principle unsung

  Are clues in this narration to a mystery

  Even now unsolved, and only to be told

  As a ghost story against a haunting—

  As you, father, haunt me. The rope trails

  From your fingers. Below you the abyss.

  Your arms balanced as the scales of justice,

  You tie the blindfold. Then from your own eyes fall scales.

  But too late. Tears of doubt. Tears of remorse.

  Dropping on your own neck like a noose.

  A Soldier’s Son

  A young man’s war it is, a young man’s war,

  Or so they say and so they go to wage

  This struggle where, armored only in nightmare,

  Every warrior is under age—

  A son seeing each night leave, as father,

  A man who may become the ancestor

  In a backstreet stabbing, at a ghetto corner

  Of future wars and further fratricide.

  Son of a soldier who saw war on the ground,

  Now cross the peace lines I have made for you

  To find on this side if not peace then honor,

  Your heritage, knowing as I do

&
nbsp; That in the cross-hairs of his gun he found

  You his only son, and when he aimed

  And when the bullet cracked, the only sound

  Was of his son rifling his heart. You twist

  That heart today. You are his killed, his maimed.

  He is your war. You are his pacifist.

  The Greek Experience

  Until that night, the night I lost my wonder,

  He was my deity. First of my mentors.

  Master craftsman he; mere apprentice

  I, hearing how Croesus, to entice

  The priestess predators

  Wooed a false oracle. But mine the truth

  I thought, marveling at Cyrus tuned to plunder

  By oboes, playing on Persia. But who cares now?

  My name means nothing here. His, Herodotus,

  Towers in Babylon, salts the Aegean

  Is silted into each Ionic ear.

  Only I know the charlatan

  The mountebank who tongued

  Day slyly to night

  To suit his purpose. Prepared to be harangued

  And angled by his anecdotes, his school

  Of stories, instead I found that night

  A mind incapable of insight as a mule

  Of generation. “The times need iron men,

  Pragmatists,” he said, “who can devise

  For those problems which arise

  So frequently, a swift solution.

  A man such as this:

  He is a soldier, able to lead, to train.

  His stallion where the Gyndes finds the Tigris

  And those two rivers join in dissolution

  In the Gulf, drowned. The waters combed its mane.

  “Now he was leading Persian against Mede

  But called a truce, cut his troops in two

  And swore revenge upon the water.

  He was the first to take his blade,

  The first to teach the lesson

  With stabs and thrusts. He prolonged the slaughter

  All summer long. The river now is channeled.

  Those are the men we need.” I listened, chilled.

  “A soldier is lost to us. Now a deadly assassin

  “Lies in wait for us all,” was my recourse.

  “Nonsense,” he said. But I was trying to live

  The ambush, the sudden fever,

  The assault of a single force—

  An instant, the divider

  Of a man from his own mind, his mythic source,

  His origin in animal and primative,

  Which changes centaur into horse and rider—