by Eavan Boland
the clicking thumbs and the big hips of
the navy-skirted ticket collectors with
their crooked seams brought it home to me:
Exile. Ration-book pudding.
Bowls of dripping and the fixed smile
of the school pianist playing “Iolanthe,”
“Land of Hope and Glory”
and “John Peel.”
I didn’t know what to hold, to keep.
At night, filled with some malaise
of love for what I’d never known I had,
I fell asleep and let the moment pass.
The passing moment has become a night
of clipped shadows, freshly painted houses,
the garden eddying in dark and heat,
my children half-awake, half-asleep.
Airless, humid dark. Leaf-noise.
The stirrings of a garden before rain.
A hint of storm behind the risen moon.
We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to?—
in a strange city, in another country,
on nights in a North-facing bedroom,
waiting for the sleep that never did
restore me as I’d hoped to what I’d lost—
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen-fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“you’re not in Ireland now.”
Fond Memory
It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted;
where they cried—or almost all—when the Reverend Mother
announced at lunch-time that the King had died
peacefully in his sleep. I dressed in wool as well,
ate rationed food, played English games and learned
how wise the Magna Carta was, how hard the Hanoverians
had tried, the measure and complexity of verse,
the hum and score of the whole orchestra.
At three-o-clock I caught two buses home
where sometimes in the late afternoon
at a piano pushed into a corner of the playroom
my father would sit down and play the slow
lilts of Tom Moore while I stood there trying
not to weep at the cigarette smoke stinging up
from between his fingers and—as much as I could think—
I thought this is my country, was, will be again,
this upward-straining song made to be
our safe inventory of pain. And I was wrong.
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland
Something beating in
making pain and attention—
a heat still
livid on the skin
is the might-have-been:
the nation, the city
which fell
for want of
the elevation in
this view of the Piazza,
its everyday light
making it everyone’s
remembered city:
airs and shadows,
cambered distances.
I remember
a city like this—
the static coral
of reflected brick
in its river.
I envy these
pin-pointed citizens
their solid ease,
their lack of any need
to come and see
the beloved republic
raised
and saved
and scalded into
something measurable.
The Emigrant Irish
Like oil lamps we put them out the back,
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example.
They would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power.
Cardboard, Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.
And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.
Tirade for the Lyric Muse
You’re propped and swabbed and bedded.
I could weep.
There’s a stench of snipped flesh
and tubed blood.
I’ve come to see if beauty is skin deep.
Mongrel features.
Tainted lint and cotton.
Sutures from the lip to ear to brow.
They’ve patched your wrinkles
and replaced your youth.
It may be beauty
but it isn’t truth.
You are the victim of a perfect crime.
You have no sense of time.
You never had.
You never dreamed he could be so cruel.
Which is why you lie back
shocked in cambric,
slacked in bandages
and blubbing gruel.
My white python writhing your renewal!
I loved you once.
It seemed so right, so neat.
The moon, the month, the flower, the kiss—
there wasn’t anything that wouldn’t fit.
The ends were easy
and the means were short
when you and I were lyric and elect.
Shall I tell you what we overlooked?
You in this bed.
You with your snout,
your seams, your stitches
and your sutured youth.
You,
you with your smocked mouth
are what your songs left out.
We still have time.
Look in the glass.
Time is the flaw.
Truth is the crystal.
We have been sisters
in the crime.
Let us be sisters
in the physic:
Listen.
Bend your darned head.
Turn your good ear.
Share my music.
The Woman Takes Her Revenge on the Moon
Claret. Plum. Cinnabar.
The damask of the peach.
The flame and sweet
carmine of late berries.
The orchard colors of the morning—
I am learning them.
I streak ochers on my cheeks.
This is my makeup box.
This is how I own
the tone secrets of the dawn.
It takes skill
to make my skin
a facsimile
of absolute light,
of scarlet turning into carmine.
Once I start
I lose all sense
of time, of space,
of clarity, of will.
I mix to kill.
Orange madder.
The magenta tint.
I am perfecting it.
It must be excellent
or she won’t fall for it.
I fresh the pearly wet
across my face.
I rouge the flesh.
I spread and flush the red.
The trap is set.
I walk out
in the evening air.
Early, early
in the clear evening.
I raise my head li
ke a snare.
There it is.
I can feel it—
the pleasure of it!—
the dun slither,
the hysteric of her white
expression, its surprise
as she drowns,
as she douses
in my face,
in my sunrise.
The Glass King
Isabella of Bavaria married Charles VI of France in 1385. In later years
his madness took the form of believing he was made from glass.
When he is ready he is raised and carried
among his vaporish plants; the palms and ferns flex;
they almost bend; you’d almost think they were going to kiss him;
and so they might; but she will not, his wife,
no she can’t kiss his lips in case he splinters
into a million Bourbons, mad pieces.
What can she do with him—her daft prince?
His nightmares are the Regency of France.
Yes, she’s been through it all, his Bavaroise,
blub-hipped and docile, urgent to be needed—
from churching to milk fever, from tongue-tied princess
to the queen of a mulish king—and now this.
They were each other’s fantasy in youth.
No splintering at all about that mouth
when they were flesh and muscle, woman and man,
fire and kindling. See that silk divan?
Enough said. Now the times themselves
are his asylum: these are the Middle Ages, sweet
and savage era of the saving grace; indulgences
are two a penny; under the stonesmith’s hand
stone turns into lace. I need his hand now.
Outside my window October soaks the stone;
you can hear it; you’d almost think
the brick was drinking it; the rowan drips
and history waits. Let it wait. I want
no elsewheres: the clover-smelling, stove-warm
air of autumn catches cold; the year turns;
the leaves fall; the poem hesitates:
If we could see ourselves, not as we do—
in mirrors, self-deceptions, self-regardings—
but as we ought to be and as we have been:
poets, lute-stringers, makyres and abettors
of our necessary art, soothsayers of the ailment
and disease of our times, sweet singers,
truth tellers, intercessors for self-knowledge—
what would we think of these fin-de-siècle
half-hearted penitents we have become
at the sick-bed of the century: hand-wringing
elegists with an ill-concealed greed
for the inheritance?
My prince, demented
in a crystal past, a lost France, I elect you emblem
and ancestor of our lyric: it fits you like a glove—
doesn’t it?—the part; untouchable; outlandish,
esoteric, inarticulate and out of reach
of human love: studied every day by your wife,
an ordinary honest woman out of place
in all this, wanting nothing more than the man
she married, all her sorrows in her stolid face.
Index
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
After a friend has gone I like the feel of it, 175
After the Irish of Aodghan O’Rathaille, 20
And then the dark fell and “there has never,” 182
Anon, 85
Anorexic, 96
A striped philistine with quick, 34
At first light the legislator, 58
Athene’s Song, 17
Atlantic Ocean, The, 69
A troubadour once lost his king, 32
At various times strenuous sailing men, 26
A young man’s war it is, a young man’s war, 55
Ballad of Beauty and Time, A, 118
Ballyvaughan, 177
Belfast vs. Dublin, 23
Bent over, 167
Bold as crystal, bright as glass, 65
Botanic Gardens, The, 82
Bottle Garden, The, 169
Breakfast over, islanded by noise, 117
Briar Rose, The, 172
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland, 193
Child of Our Time, 52
Chorus of the Shadows, 66
Claret. Plum. Cinnabar, 197
Come to the country where justice is seen to be done, 53
Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry, 71
Country hands on the handlebars, 80
Cyclist with Cut Branches, 80
Cynic at Kilmainham Jail, A, 22
Daphne with Her Thighs in Bark, 123
Dedication: The Other Woman and the Novelist, 47
Degas’s Laundresses, 115
Domestic Interior, 135
Dressed in the colors of a country day—, 18
Emigrant Irish, The, 194
Envoi, 186
Etain twice a woman twice a queen, 35
Exhibitionist, 107
Famine Road, The, 50
Fever, 163
Fire in Our Neighborhood, The, 176
Flesh is heretic, 96
Flight of the Earls, The, 21
Fond Memory, 192
From August they embark on every wind, 28
From my father’s head I sprung, 17
From the Irish of Pangur Ban, 67
From the painting Back from Market by Chardin, 18
From this I will not swerve nor fall nor falter, 84
Glass King, The, 199
Greek Experience, The, 56
Growing Up, 178
Guided by love, leaving aside dispute, 82
Hanging Judge, The, 53
How often, 128
I decanted them—feather mosses, fan-shaped plants, 169
“Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones,” 50
I have been thinking at random, 131
I have written this, 123
I know you have a world I cannot share, 47
In Her Own Image, 93
In His Own Image, 94
In middle age you exchanged the sandals, 24
Intimate as underthings, 172
Into this city of largesse, 23
I Remember, 155
I remember the way the big windows washed, 155
Irish Childhood in England: 1951, An, 190
Isabella of Bavaria married Charles VI of France in 1385. In later years, 199
I saw him first lost in the lion cages, 83
is what remained or what they thought, 163
I sympathize but wonder what he fled, 85
It came to me one afternoon in summer, 180
It is dark again, 102
It is Easter in the suburb. Clematis, 186
It is her eyes, 93
It’s a Woman’s World, 121
It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted, 192
I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout, 91
I wake to dark, 107
I was not myself, myself, 94
I was standing there, 160
I won’t go back to it, 156
Jean-Baptiste Chardin, 158
Journey, The, 182
King and the Troubadour, The, 32
Lace, 167
Laws of Love, The, 58
Lights, 133
Like oil lamps we put them out the back, 194
Listen. This Is the Noise of Myth, 187
“Listen to me,” I said to my neighbor, 165
Making Up, 110
Mastectomy, 98
Menses, 102
Migration, 28
Mirages, 26
Mise Eire, 156
My ears heard, 98
My gifts, 104
My naked face, 1
10
Myself and Pangur, cat and sage, 67
Naoise at Four, 79
New Pastoral, The, 125
New Territory, 19
Night, 100
No, Comrade Inspector, I won’t sit down, 71
Nocturne, 175
Now it is winter and the hare, 60
Ode to Suburbia, 77
O Fons Bandusiae, 65
On Holiday, 177
O nurse when I was a rascal boy, 29
Oral Tradition, The, 160
Our way of life, 121
Patchwork, 131
Pilgrim, The, 27
Plainly came the time, 118
Poets, The, 25
Pose, 130
Princes, it seems, are seldom wise, 21
Prisoners, 83
Puppets we are, strung by a puppet master, 66
Ready for Flight, 84
Requiem for a Personal Friend, 34
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening, 158
Several things announced the fact to us, 19
She is a housekeeping. A spring cleaning, 130
Sisters, 60
Six o’clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister, 77
Soldier’s Son, A, 55
Solitary, 100
Something beating in, 193
Song, 81
Suburban Woman, 86
Suburban Woman: A Detail, 170
The bickering vowels in the buses, 190
The chimneys have been swept, 170
The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel, 125
Their two heads, hatted, bowed, mooning, 178
There and Back, 179
There is nowhere that the gimlet twilight has not, 22
The sign factory went on fire last night, 176
The trap baited for them snaps, 79
They like all creatures, being made, 25
This dry night, nothing unusual, 48
This is dawn, 135
This is the hour I love: the in-between, 173
This is the story of a man and woman, 187
This stone, this Spanish Stone, flings light, 69
Three Songs for a Legend, 29
Tirade for the Lyric Muse, 195
Tirade for the Mimic Muse, 91
Town and country at each other’s throat, 86
Unlived Life, The, 165
Unpod, 126
Until that night, the night I lost my wonder, 56
War Horse, The, 48
We sailed the long way home, 133
When the nest falls in winter, birds have flown, 27
Where in blind files, 81
Wild Spray, The, 180
Winning of Etain, The, 35
Witching, 104
Without flocks or cattle or the curved horns, 20
Woman Changes Her Skin, The, 128
Woman in Kitchen, 117
Woman Takes Her Revenge on the Moon, The, 197