by Eavan Boland
that now makes me
animal
inanimate, satiate,
and back I go
to a slack tip,
a light.
I stint my worship,
the cold watch I keep.
Fires flint somewhere else.
I winter
into sleep.
Menses
It is dark again,
I am sick of it
filled with it,
dulled by it,
thick with it.
To be the mere pollution of her wake!
a water cauled by her light,
a slick haul,
a fallen self,
a violence,
a daughter.
I am the moon’s looking-glass.
My days are moon-dials.
She will never be done with me.
She needs me.
She is dry.
I leash to her,
a sea,
a washy heave,
a tide.
Only my mind is free
among the ruffian growths,
the bindweed
and the meadowsweet,
the riff-raff of my garden.
How I envy them;
each filament,
each anther bred
from its own style,
its stamen,
is to itself a christening,
is to itself a marriage bed.
They fall to earth,
so ignorant
so innocent
of the sweated waters
and the watered salts,
of ecstasy,
of birth.
They are street-walkers,
lesbians,
nuns.
I am not one of them
and how they’d pity me
now as dusk encroaches
and she comes
looking for her looking-glass.
And it is me.
Yes it is me
she poaches her old face in.
I am bloated with her waters.
I am barren with her blood.
Another hour
and she will addle me
till I begin
to think like her.
As when I’ve grown
round and obscene with child,
or when I moan,
for him between the sheets,
then I begin to know
that I am bright and original
and that my light’s my own.
Witching
My gifts
are nightly,
shifty, bookish.
By my craft
I bald the grass,
abort the birth
of calves
and warts.
I study dark.
Another age
and I’d have been
waisted
in a hedgy rage
of prejudice
and hate.
But times have changed.
They will be brought
to book.
these my enemies—
and bell
and candle too—
who breed
and breed,
who talk and talk—
birth
and bleeding,
the bacteria of feeds.
Midnight.
Now I own
the earth
The witching hour.
You’d think
you’d think
the bitches
couldn’t reach
me here.
But here they are.
The nursery lights
they shine, they shine,
they multiply
they douse
mine!
But I
Know
what to do:
I will
Reverse
their arson,
make
a pyre of my haunch
and so
the last thing
they know
will be
the stench
of my crotch.
Flaming
tindering
I’ll single
a page
of history
for these my sisters
for those kin
they kindled.
Yes it’s my turn
to stack
the twigs
and twig the fire
and smell
how well
a woman’s
flesh
can burn.
Exhibitionist
I wake to dark,
a window slime of dew.
Time to start
Working
from the text,
making
from this trash
and gimmickry
of sex
my aesthetic:
a hip first,
a breast,
a slow
shadow strip
out of clothes
that busheled me
asleep.
What an artist am I!
Barely light
and yet—
cold shouldering
clipped laurel,
nippling the road—
I subvert
sculpture,
the old mode;
I skin
I dimple clay,
I flesh,
I rump stone.
This is my way—
to strip and strip
until
my dusk flush,
nude shade,
hush
of hip,
backbone,
thigh
blacks light
and I
become the night.
What stars
I harvest
to my dark!
Cast down
Lucifers,
spruce
businessmen,
their eyes
cast down.
I have them now.
I’ll teach them now.
I’ll show them how
in offices,
their minds
blind on files,
the view
blues through
my curves and arcs.
They are
a part
of my dark plan:
Into the gutter
of their lusts
I burn
the shine
of my flesh.
Let them know
for a change
the hate
and discipline,
the lusts
that prison
and the light that is
unyielding,
frigid,
constellate.
Making Up
My naked face;
I wake to it.
How it’s dulsed and shrouded!
It’s a cloud,
a dull pre-dawn.
But I’ll soon
see to that.
I push the blusher up,
I raddle
and I prink,
pinking bone
till my eyes
are
a rouge-washed
flush on water.
Now the base
pales and wastes.
Light thins
from ear to chin,
whitening in
the ocean shine
mirror set
of my eyes
that I fledge
in old darks.
I grease and full
my mouth.
It won’t stay shut:
I look
in the glass.
My face is made,
it says:
Take nothing, nothing
at its face value:
Legendary seas,
nakedness,
that up and stuck
&nbs
p; lassitude
of thigh and buttock
that they prayed to—
it’s a trick.
Myths
are made by men.
The truth of this
wave-raiding
sea-heaving
made-up
tale
of a face
from the source
of the morning
is my own:
Mine are the rouge pots,
the hot pinks,
the fledged
and edgy mix
of light and water
out of which
I dawn.
from
Night Feed
1982
Degas’s Laundresses
You rise, you dawn
roll-sleeved Aphrodites,
out of a camisole brine,
a linen pit of stitches,
silking the fitted sheets
away from you like waves.
You seam dreams in the folds
of wash from which freshes
the whiff and reach of fields
where it bleached and stiffened.
Your chat’s sabbatical:
brides, wedding outfits,
a pleasure of leisured women
are sweated into the folds,
the neat heaps of linen.
Now the drag of the clasp.
Your wrists basket your waist.
You round to the square weight.
Wait. There behind you.
A man. There behind you.
Whatever you do don’t turn.
Why is he watching you?
Whatever you do don’t turn.
Whatever you do don’t turn.
See he takes his ease
staking his easel so,
slowly sharpening charcoal,
closing his eyes just so,
slowly smiling as if
so slowly he is
unbandaging his mind.
Surely a good laundress
would understand its twists,
its white turns,
its blind designs—
it’s your winding sheet.
Woman in Kitchen
Breakfast over, islanded by noise,
she watches the machines go fast and slow.
She stands among them as they shake the house.
They move. Their destination is specific.
She has nowhere definite to go:
she might be a pedestrian in traffic.
White surfaces retract. White
sideboards light the white of walls.
Cups wink white in their saucers.
The light of day bleaches as it falls
on cups and sideboards. She could use
the room to tap with if she lost her sight.
Machines jigsaw everything she knows.
And she is everywhere among their furor:
the tropic of the dryer tumbling clothes.
The round lunar window of the washer.
The kettle in the toaster is a kingfisher
swooping for trout above the river’s mirror.
The wash done, the kettle boiled, the sheets
spun and clean, the dryer stops dead.
The silence is a death. It starts to bury
the room in white spaces. She turns to spread
a cloth on the board and irons sheets
in a room white and quiet as a mortuary.
A Ballad of Beauty and Time
Plainly came the time
the eucalyptus tree
could not succor me,
nor the honey pot,
the sunshine vitamin.
Not even getting thin.
I had passed my prime.
Then, when bagged ash,
scalded quarts of water,
oil of the lime,
cinders for the skin
and honey all had failed,
I sorted out my money
and went to buy some time.
I knew the right address:
the occult house of shame
where all the women came
shopping for a mouth,
a new nose, an eyebrow
and entered without knocking
and stood as I did now.
A shape with a knife
stooped away from me
cutting something vague—
I couldn’t really see—
it might have been a face.
I coughed once and said
—I want a lease of life.
The room was full of masks.
Lines of grins gaping.
A wall of skin stretching.
A chin he had re-worked,
a face he had re-made.
He slit and tucked and cut.
Then straightened from his blade.
“A tuck, a hem,” he said—
“I only seam the line,
I only mend the dress.
It wouldn’t do for you:
your quarrel’s with the weave.
The best I achieve
is just a stitch in time.”
I started out again.
I knew a studio
strewn with cold heels,
closed in marble shock.
I saw the sculptor there
chiseling a nose,
and buttonholed his smock:
“It’s all very well
when you have bronzed a woman—
pinioned her and finned
wings on either shoulder.
Anyone can see
she won’t get any older.
What good is that to me?
“See the last of youth
slumming in my skin,
my sham pink mouth.
Here behold your critic—
the threat to your aesthetic.
I am the brute proof.
Beauty is not truth.”
“Truth is in our lies—”
he angrily replied.
“This woman fledged in stone,
the center of all eyes,
her own museum blind:
we sharpen with our skills
the arts of compromise.
“And all I have cast
in crystal or in glass,
in lapis or in onyx,
comes from my knowledge when—
above the honest flaw—
to lift and stay my hand
and say ‘let it stand’.”
It’s a Woman’s World
Our way of life
has hardly changed
since a wheel first
whetted a knife.
Maybe flame
burns more greedily,
and wheels are steadier
but we’re the same
who milestone
our lives
with oversights—
living by the lights
of the loaf left
by the cash register,
the washing powder
paid for and wrapped,
the wash left wet:
like most historic peoples
we are defined
by what we forget,
by what we never will be—
star-gazers,
fire-eaters.
It’s our alibi
for all time:
as far as history goes
we were never
on the scene of the crime.
So when the king’s head
gored its basket—
grim harvest—
we were gristing bread
or getting the recipe
for a good soup
to appetize
our gossip.
It’s still the same.
By night our windows
moth our children
to the flame
of hearth not history.
And still no page
scores the low music
of our outrage.
/> Appearances
still reassure:
that woman there,
craned to the starry mystery
is merely getting a breath
of evening air,
while this one here—
her mouth
a burning plume—
she’s no fire-eater,
just my frosty neighbor
coming home.
Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark
I have written this
so that,
in the next myth,
my sister will be wiser.
Let her learn from me:
the opposite of passion
is not virtue
but routine.
Look at me.
I can be cooking,
making coffee,
scrubbing wood, perhaps,
and back it comes:
the crystalline, the otherwhere,
the wood
where I was
when he began the chase.
And how I ran from him!
Pan-thighed,
satyr-faced he was.
The trees reached out to me.
I silvered and
I quivered. I shook out
my foil of quick leaves.
He snouted past.
What a fool I was!
I shall be here forever,
setting out the tea,
among the coppers and the branching alloys and
the tin shine of this kitchen;
laying saucers on the pine table.
Save face, sister.
Fall. Stumble.
Rut with him.
His rough heat will keep you warm and
you will be better off than me,
with your memories
down the garden,
at the start of March,
unable to keep your eyes
off the chestnut tree—
just the way
it thrusts and hardens.
The New Pastoral
The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel
to read his world.
I’m in the dark.
I am a lost, last inhabitant—
displaced person
in a pastoral chaos.
All day I listen to
the loud distress, the switch and tick of
new herds.
But I’m no shepherdess.
Can I unbruise these sprouts or cleanse this mud flesh
till it roots again?
Can I make whole
this lamb’s knuckle, butchered from its last crooked suckling?
I could be happy here,
I could be something more than a refugee
were it not for this lamb unsuckled, for the nonstop
switch and tick
telling me
there was a past,
there was a pastoral,
and these chance sights
are little more than
amnesias of a rite
I danced once on a frieze.
The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish
Unpod
the bag,
the seed.
Slap
the flanks back.