by Eavan Boland
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
Suburban Woman
I
Town and country at each other’s throat –
between a space of truce until one night
walls began to multiply, to spawn
like lewd whispers of the goings-on,
the romperings, the rape on either side,
the smiling killing, that you were better dead
than let them get you. But they came, armed
with blades and ladders, with slimed
knives, day after day, week by week –
a proxy violation. She woke
one morning to the usual story: withdrawing,
neither side had gained, but there, dying,
caught in cross-fire, her past lay, bleeding
from wounds each meant for each, which needing
each other for other wars they could not inflict
one on another. Haemorrhaging to hacked
roads, in back gardens, like a pride
of lions toiled for booty, tribal acres died
and her world with them. She saw their power to sever
with a scar. She is the sole survivor.
II
Morning: mistress of talcums, spun
and second cottons, run tights
she is, courtesan to the lethal
rapine of routine. The room invites.
She reaches to fluoresce the dawn.
The kitchen lights like a brothel.
III
The chairs dusted and the morning
coffee break behind, she starts pawning
her day again to the curtains, the red
carpets, the stair rods, at last to the bed,
the unmade bed where once in an underworld
of limbs, her eyes freckling the night like jewelled
lights on a cave wall, she, crying, stilled,
bargained out of nothingness her child,
bartered from the dark her only daughter.
Waking, her cheeks dried, to a brighter
dawn she sensed in her as in April earth
a seed, a life ransoming her death.
IV
Late, quiet across her garden
sunlight shifts like a cat
burglar, thieving perspectives,
leaving her in the last light
alone, where, as shadows harden,
lengthen, silent she perceives
veteran dead-nettles, knapweed
crutched on walls, a summer’s seed
of roses trenched in ramsons, and stares
at her life falling with her flowers,
like military tribute or the tears
of shell-shocked men, into arrears.
V
Her kitchen blind down – a white flag –
the day’s assault over, now she will shrug
a hundred small surrenders off as images
stillborn, unwritten metaphors, blank pages
and on this territory, blindfold, we meet
at last, veterans of a defeat
no truce will heal, no formula prevent
breaking out fresh again; again the print
of twigs stalking her pillow will begin
a new day and all her victims then –
hopes unreprieved, hours taken hostage –
will newly wake, while I, on a new page
will watch, like town and country, word, thought
look for ascendancy, poise, retreat
leaving each line maimed, my forces used.
Defeated we survive, we two, housed
together in my compromise, my craft.
Who are of one another the first draft.
The Laws of Love
for Mary Robinson
At first light the legislator
Who schooled you, creator
Of each force, each element,
Its secret law, its small print
Nature – while dawn, baptismal as waters
Which broke early in dark, began –
First saw the first of your daughters
Become in your arms a citizen.
How easy for you to have made
For her a perfumed stockade,
How easy for you to impose
Laws and structures, torts for those
Fragments which matter less and less
As all fragments, and we must bless
The child, its murderer, defend
This chaos somehow which must end
With order. But who can separate
Hatred from its opposite
Or judge which is the other’s source
Today, unless perhaps that force
Which makes your Moy in its ridge pool
Prime teenage trout for butchery,
While at the same time fulfil
The blood-tie of the tide, as we
Once new found sisters, each grown miser
With new found blood began to trade
Salmond for Shakespeare, none the wiser
Then but now I see it focus
Slowly a miracle, a closing wound.
That sisters kill, that sisters die, must mock us
Now, unless, with separate speech we find
For them new blood, for them now plead
Another world for whose horizons,
For whose anguish no reprieve
Exists unless new citizens,
And, as we found, laws of love –
We two whose very first worlds fell
Like wishes down a wishing well,
Ungranted, had we known, unwanted
Yet still there as the well is, haunted.
O Fons Bandusiae
Horace 3: XIII
Bold as crystal, bright as glass,
Your waters leap while we appear
Carrying to your woodland shrine
Gifts below your worthiness:
Grape and flower, Bandusia,
Yellow hawksbeard, ready wine.
And tomorrow we will bring
A struggling kid, his temples sore
With early horns, as sacrifice.
Tomorrow his new trumpeting
Will come to nothing, when his gore
Stains and thaws your bright ice.
Canicula, the lamp of drought,
The summer’s fire, leaves your grace
Inviolate in the woods where
Every day you spring to comfort
The broad bull in his trace,
The herd out of the shepherd’s care.
With every fountain, every spring
Of legend, I will set you down
In praise and immortal spate:
These waters which drop gossiping
To ground, this wet surrounding stone
And this green oak I celebrate.
Cyclist with Cut Branches
Country hands on the handlebars,
A bicycle bisecting cars
Lethal and casual
In rush hour traffic, I remember
Seeing, as I watched that September
For you as usual.
Like rapid mercury abused
By summer heat where it is housed
In slender telling glass,
My heart taking grief’s temperature,
That summer, lost its powers to cure,
Its gift to analyse.
Jasmine and the hyacinth,
&n
bsp; The lintel mortar and the plinth
Of spring across his bars,
Like globed grapes at first I thought,
Then at last more surely wrought
Like winter’s single stars
Until I glimpsed not him but you
Like an animal the packs pursue
To covert in a forest,
And knew the branches were not spring’s
Nor ever summer’s ample things,
But decay’s simple trust.
And since we had been like them cut
But from the flowering not the root
Then we had thanks to give –
That they and we had opened once,
Had found the light, had lost its glance
And still had lives to live.
Song
Where in blind files
Bats outsleep the frost
Water slips through stones
Too fast, too fast
For ice; afraid he’d slip
By me I asked him first.
Round as a bracelet
Clasping the wet grass,
An adder drowsed by berries
Which change blood to cess.
Dreading delay’s venom
I risked the first kiss.
My skirt in my hand,
Lifting the hem high
I forded the river there.
Drops splashed my thigh.
Ahead of me at last
He turned at my cry:
‘Look how the water comes
Boldly to my side;
See the waves attempt
What you have never tried.’
He late that night
Followed the leaping tide.
from IN HER OWN IMAGE
1980
Anorexic
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
Yes I am torching
her curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.
How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers
till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.
I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.
I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.
Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe
a claustrophobia,
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide
once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.
Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,
I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.
Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy
past pain,
keeping his heart
such company
as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall
into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed.
In Her Own Image
It is her eyes:
the irises are gold
and round they go
like the ring on my wedding finger,
round and round
and I can’t touch
their histories or tears.
To think they were once my satellites!
They shut me out now.
Such light years!
She is not myself
anymore she is not
even in my sky
anymore and I
am not myself.
I will not disfigure
her pretty face.
Let her wear amethyst thumbprints,
a family heirloom,
a sort of burial necklace
and I know just the place:
Where the wall glooms,
where the lettuce seeds,
where the jasmine springs
no surprises
I will bed her.
She will bloom there,
second nature to me,
the one perfection
among compromises.
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
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.
Tirade for the Mimic Muse
I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout.
So here you are fumed in candle-stink.
Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass.
How you arch and pout in it!
How you poach your face in it!
Anyone would think you were a whore –
An ageing out-of-work kind-hearted tart.
I know you for the ruthless bitch you are:
Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse –
Our Muse of Mimic Art.
Eye-shadow, swivel brushes, blushers,
Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks,
Ice for the pores, a mud mask –
All the latest tricks.
Not one of them disguise
That there’s a dead millennium in your eyes.
You try to lamp the sockets of your loss:
The lives that famished for your look of love.
Your time is up. There’s not a stroke, a flick
Can make your crime cosmetic.
With what drums and dances, what deceits
Rituals and flatteries of war,
Chants and pipes and witless empty rites
And war-like men
And wet-eyed patient women
You did protect yourself from horrors,
From the lizarding of eyelids
From the whiskering of nipples,
From the slow betrayals of our bedroom mirrors –
How you fled
The kitchen screw and the rack of labour,
The wash thumbed and the dish cracked,
The scream of beaten women,
The crime of babies battered,
&n
bsp; The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief
That seeks asylum behind suburb walls –
A world you could have sheltered in your skirts –
And well I know and how I see it now,
The way you latched your belt and itched your hem
And shook it off like dirt.
And I who mazed my way to womanhood
Through all your halls of mirrors, making faces,
To think I waited on your trashy whim!
Hoping your lamp and flash,
Your glass, might show
This world I needed nothing else to know
But love and again love and again love.
In a nappy stink, by a soaking wash
Among stacked dishes
Your glass cracked,
Your luck ran out. Look. My words leap
Among your pinks, your stench pots and sticks.
They scatter shadow, swivel brushes, blushers.
Make your face naked.
Strip your mind naked.
Drench your skin in a woman’s tears.
I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.
I will show you true reflections, terrors.
You are the Muse of all our mirrors.
Look in them and weep.
from NIGHT FEED
1982
Night Feed
This is dawn.
Believe me
This is your season, little daughter.
The moment daisies open,