by Eavan Boland
jingled at the rim of the lemonade jug
is still.
And the shrubbed lavender
will find
neither fragrance nor muslin.
VII We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History.
At twilight in
the shadow of the poplars
the children found a swarm of wild bees.
It was late summer and I knew as
they came shouting in that, yes,
this evening had been singled out by
a finger pointing at trees,
the inland feel of that greenness,
the sugar-barley iron of a garden chair
and children still bramble-height
and fretful from the heat and a final
brightness stickle-backing that particular
patch of grass across which light
was short-lived and elegiac as
the view from a train window of
a station parting, all tears. And this,
this I thought, is how it will have been
chosen from those summer evenings
which under the leaves of the poplars –
striped dun and ochre, simmering over
the stashed-up debris of old seasons –
a swarm of wild bees is making use of.
VIII An Old Steel Engraving
Look.
The figure in the foreground breaks his fall with
one hand. He cannot die.
The river cannot wander
into the shadows to be dragged by willows.
The passer-by is scared witless. He cannot escape.
He cannot stop staring at
this hand which can barely raise
the patriot
above the ground which is
the origin and reason for it all.
More closely now:
at the stillness of unfinished action in
afternoon heat, at the spaces on the page. They widen
to include us:
we have found
the country of our malediction where
nothing can move until we find the word,
nothing can stir until we say this is
what happened and is happening and history
is one of us who turns away
while the other is
turning the page.
Is this river which
moments ago must have flashed the morse
of a bayonet thrust. And is moving on.
IX In Exile
The German girls who came to us that winter and
the winter after and who helped my mother fuel
the iron stove and arranged our clothes in wet
thicknesses on the wooden rail after tea was over,
spoke no English, understood no French. They were
sisters from a ruined city and they spoke rapidly
in their own tongue: syllables in which pain was
radical, integral; and with what sense of injury
the language angled for an unhurt kingdom – for
the rise, curve, kill and swift return to the wrist,
to the hood – I never knew. To me they were the sounds
of evening only, of the cold, of the Irish dark and
continuous with all such recurrences: the drizzle in
the lilac, the dusk always at the back door, like
the tinkers I was threatened with, the cat inching
closer to the fire with its screen of clothes, where
I am standing in the stone-flagged kitchen; there are
bleached rags, perhaps, and a pot of tea on the stove.
And I see myself, four years of age and looking up,
storing such music – guttural, hurt to the quick –
as I hear now, forty years on and far from where
I heard it first. Among these salt-boxes, marshes and
the glove-tanned colours of the sugar-maples, in
this New England town at the start of winter, I am
so much south of it: the soft wet, the light and
those early darks which strengthen the assassin’s
hand; and hide the wound. Here, in this scalding air,
my speech will not heal. I do not want it to heal.
X We Are Always Too Late
Memory
is in two parts.
First, the re-visiting:
the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.
It is New England, breakfast-time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.
New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then
the re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always, I am going towards her.
The flush and scald is
to her forehead now and back down to her neck.
I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.
XI What We Lost
It is a winter afternoon.
The hills are frozen. Light is failing.
The distance is a crystal earshot.
A woman is mending linen in her kitchen.
She is a countrywoman.
Behind her cupboard doors she hangs sprigged,
stove-dried lavender in muslin.
Her letters and mementoes and memories
are packeted in satin at the back with
gaberdine and worsted and
the cambric she has made into bodices;
the good tobacco silk for Sunday Mass.
She is sewing in the kitchen.
The sugar-feel of flax is in her hands.
Dusk. And the candles brought in then.
One by one. And the quiet sweat of wax.
There is a child at her side.
The tea is poured, the stitching put down.
The child grows still, sensing something of importance.
The woman settles and begins her story.
Believe it, what we lost is here in this room
on this veiled evening.
The woman finishes. The story ends.
The child, who is my mother, gets up, moves away.
In the winter air, unheard, unshared,
the moment happens, hangs fire, leads nowhere.
The light will fail and the room darken,
the child fall asleep and the story be forgotten.
The fields are dark already.
The frail connections have been made and are broken.
The dumb-show of legend has become language,
is becoming silence and who will know that once
words were possibilities and disappointments,
were scented closets filled with love-letters
and memories and lavender hemmed into muslin,
stored in sachets, aired in bed-linen;
and travelled silks and the tones of cotton
tautened into bodices, subtly shaped by breathing;
were the rooms of childhood with their griefless peace,
their hands and whispers, their candles weeping brightly?
XII Outside History
There are outsiders, always. These stars –
these iron inklings of an Irish January,
whose light happened
thousands of years before
our pain did: they are, they have always been
outside history.
They keep their distance. Under them remains
a place where you found
you were human and
a landscape in which you know you are mortal.
And a time to choose between them.
I have chosen:
out of myth into history I move to be
part of that ordeal
whose darkness is
only now reaching me from those fields,
those rivers, those roads clotted as
firmaments with the dead.
How slowly they die
as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.
And we are too late. We are always too late.
III Distances
Distances
The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen.
The clock says eight and the light says
winter. You are pulling up your hood against a bad morning.
Don’t leave, I say. Don’t go without telling me
the name of that song. You call it back to me from the stairs –
‘I Wish I Was In Carrickfergus’
and the words open out with emigrant grief the way the streets
of a small town open out in
memory: salt-loving fuchsias to one side and
a market in full swing on the other with
linen for sale and tacky apples and a glass and wire hill
of spectacles on a metal tray. The front door bangs
and you’re gone. I will think of it all morning while a fine
drizzle closes in, making the distances
fiction: not of that place but this and of how
restless we would be, you and I, inside the perfect
music of that basalt and sandstone
coastal town. We would walk the streets in
the scentless afternoon of a ballad measure,
longing to be able
to tell each other that the starched lace and linen of
adult handkerchiefs scraped your face and left your tears
falling; how the apples were mush inside the crisp sugar
shell and the spectacles out of focus.
Midnight Flowers
I go down step by step.
The house is quiet, full of trapped heat and sleep.
In the kitchen everything is still.
Nothing is distinct; there is no moon to speak of.
I could be undone every single day by
paradox or what they call in the countryside
blackthorn winter,
when hailstones come with the first apple blossom.
I turn a switch and the garden grows.
A whole summer’s work in one instant!
I press my face to the glass. I can see
shadows of lilac, of fuchsia; a dark likeness of blackcurrant:
little clients of suddenness, how sullen they are at
the margins of the light.
They need no rain, they have no roots.
I reach out a hand; they are gone.
When I was a child a snapdragon was
held an inch from my face. Look, a voice said, this
is the colour of your hair. And there it was, my head,
a pliant jewel in the hands of someone else.
Our Origins Are in the Sea
I live near the coast. On these summer nights
the dog-star rises somewhere near the hunter,
near the sun. I stand at the edge of our grass.
I do not connect them: once they were connected –
the fixity of stars and unruly salt water –
by sailors with an avarice for landfall.
And this is land. The way the whitebeams will
begin their fall to an alluvial earth and
a bicycle wheel is spinning on it, proves that.
From where I stand the sea is just a rumour.
The stars are put out by our streetlamp. Light
and seawater are well separated. And how little
survives of the sea-captain in his granddaughter
is everywhere apparent. Such things get lost.
He drowned in the Bay of Biscay. I never saw him.
I turn to go in. The hills are indistinct.
The coast is near and darkening. The stars are clearer.
The grass and the house are lapped in shadow.
And the briar rose is rigged in the twilight,
the way I imagine sails used to be –
lacy and stiff together, a frigate of ivory.
What Love Intended
I can imagine if,
I came back again,
looking through windows at
broken mirrors, pictures,
and, in the cracked upstairs,
the beds where it all began.
The suburb in the rain
this October morning,
full of food and children
and animals, will be –
when I come back again –
gone to rack and ruin.
I will be its ghost,
its revenant, discovering
again in one place
the history of my pain,
my ordeal, my grace,
unable to resist
seeing what is past,
judging what has ended
and whether, first to last,
from then to now and even
here, ruined, this
is what love intended –
finding even the yellow
jasmine in the dusk,
the smell of early dinners,
the voices of our children,
taking turns and quarrelling,
burned on the distance,
gone. And the small square
where under cropped lime
and poplar, on bicycles
and skates in the summer,
they played until dark;
propitiating time.
And even the two whitebeams
outside the house gone, with
the next-door-neighbour
who used to say in April –
when one was slow to bloom –
they were a man and woman.
from IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE
1994
The Singers
for M.R.
The women who were singers in the West
lived on an unforgiving coast.
I want to ask was there ever one
moment when all of it relented,
when rain and ocean and their own
sense of home were revealed to them
as one and the same?
After which
every day was still shaped by weather,
but every night their mouths filled with
Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars
and exhausted birds.
And only when the danger
was plain in the music could you know
their true measure of rejoicing in
finding a voice where they found a vision.
I Writing in a Time of Violence
A sequence
As in a city where the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater or less.
Plato, The Republic, X
1 That the Science of Cartography is Limited
– and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
2 The Death of Reason
When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fires down in
the hayricks and seed-barns of a darkening Ireland,
the art of portrait-painting reached its height
across the water.
The fire caught.
The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold
and the wind carried staves of a ballad.
The flesh-smell of hatred.
And she climbed the stairs.
Nameless composite. Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.
Rustling gun-coloured silks. To set a seal on Augustan London.
And sat down.
The easel waits for her
and the age is ready to resemble her and