New Selected Poems

by Eavan Boland

the small breeze cannot touch that powdered hair.

  That elegance.

  But I smell fire.

  From Antrim to the Boyne the sky is reddening as

  the painter tints alizerine crimson with a mite of yellow

  mixed once with white and finds out

  how difficult it is to make the skin

  blush outside the skin.

  The flames have crossed the sea.

  They are at the lintel. At the door.

  At the canvas,

  at her mouth.

  And the curve and pout

  of supple dancing and the couplet rhyming

  and the pomander scenting death-rooms and

  the cabinet-maker setting his veneers

  in honest wood – they are kindling for the flames.

  And the dictates of reason and the blended sensibility

  of tact and proportion – yes

  the eighteenth century ends here

  as her hem scorches and the satin

  decoration catches fire. She is burning down.

  As a house might. As a candle will.

  She is ash and tallow. It is over.

  3 March 1 1847. By the First Post

  The daffodils are out & how

  you would love the harebells by

  the Blackwater now.

  But Etty, you are wise to stay away.

  London may be dull in this season.

  Meath is no better I assure you.

  Your copper silk is sewn

  & will be sent & I envy you.

  No one talks of anything but famine.

  I go nowhere –

  not from door to carriage – but a cloth

  sprinkled with bay rum & rose attar

  is pressed against my mouth.

  Our picnics by the river –

  remember that one with Major Harris? –

  our outings to the opera

  & our teas

  are over now for the time being.

  Shall I tell you what I saw on Friday,

  driving with Mama? A woman lying

  across the Kells Road with her baby –

  in full view. We had to go

  out of our way

  to get home & we were late

  & poor Mama was not herself all day.

  4 In a Bad Light

  This is St Louis. Where the rivers meet.

  The Illinois. The Mississippi. The Missouri.

  The light is in its element of autumn.

  Clear. With yellow gingko leaves falling.

  There is always a nightmare. Even in such light.

  The weather must be cold now in Dublin.

  And when skies are clear frosts come

  down on the mountains and the first

  inklings of winter will be underfoot in

  the crisp iron of a fern at dawn.

  I stand in a room in the Museum.

  In one glass case a plastic figure

  represents a woman in a dress,

  with crêpe sleeves and a satin apron.

  And feet laced neatly into suede.

  She stands in a replica of a cabin

  on a steamboat bound for New Orleans.

  The year is 1860. Nearly war.

  A notice says no comforts were spared. The silk

  is French. The seamstresses are Irish.

  I see them in the oil-lit parlours.

  I am in the gas-lit backrooms.

  We make in the apron front and from

  the papery appearance and crushable

  look of crêpe, a sign. We are bent over

  in a bad light. We are sewing a last

  sight of shore. We are sewing coffin ships.

  And the salt of exile. And our own

  death in it. For history’s abandonment

  we are doing this. And this. And

  this is a button hole. This is a stitch.

  Fury enters them the way frost follows

  every arabesque and curl of a fern: this is

  the nightmare. See how you perceive it.

  We sleep the sleep of exhaustion.

  We dream a woman on a steamboat

  parading in sunshine in a dress we know

  we made. She laughs off rumours of war.

  She turns and traps light on the skirt.

  It is, for that moment, beautiful.

  5 The Dolls Museum in Dublin

  The wounds are terrible. The paint is old.

  The cracks along the lips and on the cheeks

  cannot be fixed. The cotton lawn is soiled.

  The arms are ivory dissolved to wax.

  Recall the quadrille. Hum the waltz.

  Promenade on the yacht-club terraces.

  Put back the lamps in their copper holders,

  the carriage wheels on the cobbled quays.

  And recreate Easter in Dublin.

  Booted officers. Their mistresses.

  Sunlight criss-crossing College Green.

  Steam hissing from the flanks of horses.

  Here they are. Cradled and cleaned,

  held close in the arms of their owners.

  Their cold hands clasped by warm hands,

  their faces memorised like perfect manners.

  The altars are mannerly with linen.

  The lilies are whiter than surplices.

  The candles are burning and warning:

  Rejoice, they whisper. After sacrifice.

  Horse chestnuts hold up their candles.

  The Green is vivid with parasols.

  Sunlight is pastel and windless.

  The bar of the Shelbourne is full.

  Laughter and gossip on the terraces.

  Rumour and alarm at the barracks.

  The Empire is summoning its officers.

  The carriages are turning: they are turning back.

  Past children walking with governesses,

  Looking down, cossetting their dolls,

  then looking up as the carriage passes,

  the shadow chilling them. Twilight falls.

  It is twilight in the dolls museum. Shadows

  remain on the parchment-coloured waists,

  are bruises on the stitched cotton clothes,

  are hidden in the dimples on the wrists.

  The eyes are wide. They cannot address

  the helplessness which has lingered in

  the airless peace of each glass case:

  to have survived. To have been stronger than

  a moment. To be the hostages ignorance

  takes from time and ornament from destiny. Both.

  To be the present of the past. To infer the difference

  with a terrible stare. But not feel it. And not know it.

  6 Inscriptions

  About holiday rooms there can be

  a solid feel at first. Then, as you go upstairs,

  the air gets

  a dry rustle of excitement

  the way a new dress comes out of tissue paper,

  up and out of it, and

  the girl watching this thinks:

  Where will I wear it? Who will kiss me in it?

  Peter

  was the name on the cot.

  The cot was made of the carefully bought

  scarcities of the nineteen-forties:

  oak. Tersely planed and varnished.

  Cast-steel hinges.

  I stood where the roof sloped into

  paper roses,

  in a room where a child once went to sleep,

  looking at blue, painted lettering:

  as he slept

  someone had found for him

  five pieces of the alphabet which said

  the mauve petals of his eyelids as they closed out

  the scalded hallway moonlight made of the ocean at

  the end of his road.

  Someone knew

  the importance of giving him a name.

  For years I have known

  how important it is

  not to name


  the coffins, the murdered in them,

  the deaths in alleyways and on doorsteps –

  in case they rise out of their names

  and I recognise

  the child who slept peacefully

  and the girl who guessed at her future in

  the dress as it came out of its box

  falling free in

  kick pleats of silk.

  And what comfort can there be

  in knowing that

  in a distant room

  his sign is safe tonight

  and reposes its modest blues in darkness?

  Or that outside his window

  the name-eating elements – the salt wind, the rain –

  must find

  headstones to feed their hunger?

  7 Beautiful Speech

  In my last year in College

  I set out

  to write an essay on

  the Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find

  the country already lost to me

  in song and figure as I scribbled down

  names for sweet euphony

  and safe digression.

  And when I came to the word insinuate

  I saw that language could writhe and creep

  and the lore of snakes

  which I had learned as a child not to fear –

  because the Saint had sent them out of Ireland –

  came nearer.

  Chiasmus. Litotes. Periphrasis. Old

  indices and agents of persuasion. How

  I remember them in that room where

  a girl is writing at a desk with

  dusk already in

  the streets outside. I can see her. I could say to her –

  we will live, we have lived

  where language is concealed. Is perilous.

  We will be – we have been – citizens

  of its hiding place. But it is too late

  to shut the book of satin phrases,

  to refuse to enter

  an evening bitter with peat smoke,

  where newspaper sellers shout headlines

  and friends call out their farewells in

  a city of whispers

  and interiors where

  the dear vowels

  Irish Ireland ours are

  absorbed into autumn air,

  are out of earshot in the distances

  we are stepping into where we never

  imagine words such as hate

  and territory and the like – unbanished still

  as they always would be – wait

  and are waiting under

  beautiful speech. To strike.

  II Legends

  This Moment

  A neighbourhood.

  At dusk.

  Things are getting ready

  to happen

  out of sight.

  Stars and moths.

  And rinds slanting around fruit.

  But not yet.

  One tree is black.

  One window is yellow as butter.

  A woman leans down to catch a child

  who has run into her arms

  this moment.

  Stars rise.

  Moths flutter.

  Apples sweeten in the dark.

  Love

  Dark falls on this mid-western town

  where we once lived when myths collided.

  Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river

  which slides and deepens

  to become the water

  the hero crossed on his way to hell.

  Not far from here is our old apartment.

  We had a kitchen and an Amish table.

  We had a view. And we discovered there

  love had the feather and muscle of wings

  and had come to live with us,

  a brother of fire and air.

  We had two infant children one of whom

  was touched by death in this town

  and spared: and when the hero

  was hailed by his comrades in hell

  their mouths opened and their voices failed and

  there is no knowing what they would have asked

  about a life they had shared and lost.

  I am your wife.

  It was years ago.

  Our child is healed. We love each other still.

  Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances

  we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.

  And yet I want to return to you

  on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were,

  with snow on the shoulders of your coat

  and a car passing with its headlights on:

  I see you as a hero in a text –

  the image blazing and the edges gilded –

  and I long to cry out the epic question

  my dear companion:

  Will we ever live so intensely again?

  Will love come to us again and be

  so formidable at rest it offered us ascension

  even to look at him?

  But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.

  You walk away and I cannot follow.

  The Pomegranate

  The only legend I have ever loved is

  the story of a daughter lost in hell.

  And found and rescued there.

  Love and blackmail are the gist of it.

  Ceres and Persephone the names.

  And the best thing about the legend is

  I can enter it anywhere. And have.

  As a child in exile in

  a city of fogs and strange consonants,

  I read it first and at first I was

  an exiled child in the crackling dusk of

  the underworld, the stars blighted. Later

  I walked out in a summer twilight

  searching for my daughter at bed-time.

  When she came running I was ready

  to make any bargain to keep her.

  I carried her back past whitebeams

  and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.

  But I was Ceres then and I knew

  winter was in store for every leaf

  on every tree on that road.

  Was inescapable for each one we passed.

  And for me.

  It is winter

  and the stars are hidden.

  I climb the stairs and stand where I can see

  my child asleep beside her teen magazines,

  her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.

  The pomegranate! How did I forget it?

  She could have come home and been safe

  and ended the story and all

  our heart-broken searching but she reached

  out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.

  She put out her hand and pulled down

  the French sound for apple and

  the noise of stone and the proof

  that even in the place of death,

  at the heart of legend, in the midst

  of rocks full of unshed tears

  ready to be diamonds by the time

  the story was told, a child can be

  hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.

  The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.

  The suburb has cars and cable television.

  The veiled stars are above ground.

  It is another world. But what else

  can a mother give her daughter but such

  beautiful rifts in time?

  If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

  The legend will be hers as well as mine.

  She will enter it. As I have.

  She will wake up. She will hold

  the papery flushed skin in her hand.

  And to her lips. I will say nothing.

  Moths

  Tonight the air smells of cut grass.

  Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is

  a place mislaid between expectation and memory.

>   This has been a summer of moths.

  Their moment of truth comes well after dark.

  Then they reveal themselves at our windowledges

  and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.

  The books I look up about them are full of legends:

  ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.

  Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.

  The moon is up. The back windows are wide open.

  Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.

  Once again they are near the windowsill –

  fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,

  which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them

  they will fall down without knowing how

  or why what they steered by became, suddenly,

  what they crackled and burned around. They will perish –

  I am perishing – on the edge and at the threshold of

  the moment all nature fears and tends towards:

  the stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.

  And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes

  my child’s shadow longer than my own.

  In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own

  The linen map

  hung from the wall.

  The linen was shiny

  and cracked in places.

  The cracks were darkened by grime.

  It was fastened to the classroom wall with

  a wooden batten on

  a triangle of knotted cotton.

  The colours

  were faded out

  so the red of Empire –

  the stain of absolute possession –

  the mark once made from Kashmir

  to the oast-barns of the Kent

  coast south of us was

  underwater coral.

  Ireland was far away

  and farther away