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New Selected Poems

Page 9

by Eavan Boland


  every year.

  I was nearly an English child.

  I could list the English kings.

  I could name the famous battles.

  I was learning to recognise

  God’s grace in history.

  And the waters

  of the Irish sea,

  their shallow weave

  and cross-grained blue green

  had drained away

  to the pale gaze

  of a doll’s china eyes –

  a stare without recognition or memory.

  We have no oracles,

  no rocks or olive trees,

  no sacred path to the temple

  and no priestesses.

  The teacher’s voice had a London accent.

  This was London. 1952.

  It was Ancient History Class.

  She put the tip

  of the wooden

  pointer on the map.

  She tapped over ridges and driedout

  rivers and cities buried in

  the sea and sea-scapes which

  had once been land.

  And stopped.

  Remember this, children.

  The Roman Empire was

  the greatest Empire

  ever known –

  until our time of course –

  while the Delphic Oracle

  was reckoned to be

  the exact centre

  of the earth.

  Suddenly

  I wanted

  to stand in front of it.

  I wanted to trace over

  and over the weave of my own country.

  To read out names

  I was close to forgetting.

  Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.

  To ask

  where exactly

  was my old house?

  Its brass One and Seven.

  Its flight of granite steps.

  Its lilac tree whose scent

  stayed under your fingernails

  for days.

  For days –

  she was saying – even months,

  the ancients travelled

  to the Oracle.

  They brought sheep and killed them.

  They brought questions about tillage and war.

  They rarely left with more

  than an ambiguous answer.

  The Parcel

  There are dying arts and

  one of them is

  the way my mother used to make up a parcel.

  Paper first. Mid-brown and coarse-grained as wood.

  The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly

  or laying flat at Christmas on a pudding bowl.

  It was a big cylinder. She snipped it open

  and it unrolled quickly across the floor.

  All business, all distance.

  Then the scissors.

  Not a glittering let-up but a dour

  pair, black thumb-holes,

  the shears themselves the colour of the rained-

  on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up

  in the season of lilac and snapdragon

  and stood there arguing the rate for

  sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair

  and this one. All-in.

  The ball of twine was coarsely braided

  and only a shade less yellow than

  the flame she held under the blunt

  end of the sealing-wax until

  it melted and spread into a brittle

  terracotta medal.

  Her hair dishevelled, her tongue between her teeth,

  she wrote the address in the quarters

  twine had divided the surface into.

  Names and places. Crayon and fountain-pen.

  The town underlined once. The country twice.

  It’s ready for the post

  she would say and if we want to know

  where it went to –

  a craft lost before we missed it – watch it go

  into the burlap sack for collection.

  See it disappear. Say

  this is how it died

  out: among doomed steamships and out-dated trains,

  the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes,

  next to station names we can’t remember

  on a continent we no longer

  recognise. The sealing-wax cracking.

  The twine unravelling. The destination illegible.

  Lava Cameo

  a brooch carved on volcanic rock

  I like this story –

  My grandfather was a sea-captain.

  My grandmother always met him when his ship docked.

  She feared the women at the ports –

  except that it is not a story,

  more a rumour or a folk memory,

  something thrown out once in a random conversation;

  a hint merely.

  If I say wool and lace for her skirt and

  crêpe for her blouse

  in the neck of which is pinned a cameo,

  carved out of black, volcanic rock;

  if I make her pace the Cork docks, stopping

  to take down her parasol as a gust catches

  the silk tassels of it –

  then consider this:

  there is a way of making free with the past,

  a pastiche of what is

  real and what is

  not, which can only be

  justified if you think of it

  not as sculpture but syntax:

  a structure extrinsic to meaning which uncovers

  the inner secret of it.

  She will die at thirty-one in a fever ward.

  He will drown nine years later in the Bay of Biscay.

  They will never even be

  sepia and so I put down

  the gangplank now between the ship and the ground.

  In the story, late afternoon has become evening.

  They kiss once, their hands touch briefly.

  Please.

  Look at me, I want to say to her: show me

  the obduracy of an art which can

  arrest a profile in the flux of hell.

  Inscribe catastrophe.

  Legends

  for Eavan Frances

  Tryers of firesides,

  twilights. There are no tears in these.

  Instead, they begin the world again,

  making the mountain ridges blue

  and the rivers clear and the hero fearless –

  and the outcome always undecided

  so the next teller can say begin and

  again and astonish children.

  Our children are our legends.

  You are mine. You have my name.

  My hair was once like yours.

  And the world

  is less bitter to me

  because you will re-tell the story.

  III Anna Liffey

  Anna Liffey

  Life, the story goes,

  Was the daughter of Cannan,

  And came to the plain of Kildare.

  She loved the flat-lands and the ditches

  And the unreachable horizon.

  She asked that it be named for her.

  The river took its name from the land.

  The land took its name from a woman.

  A woman in the doorway of a house.

  A river in the city of her birth.

  There, in the hills above my house,

  The river Liffey rises, is a source.

  It rises in rush and ling heather and

  Black peat and bracken and strengthens

  To claim the city it narrated.

  Swans. Steep falls. Small towns.

  The smudged air and bridges of Dublin.

  Dusk is coming.

  Rain is moving east from the hills.

  If I could see myself

  I would see

  A woman in a doorway

  Wearing the colours that go with red hair.

 
; Although my hair is no longer red.

  I praise

  The gifts of the river.

  Its shiftless and glittering

  Re-telling of a city,

  Its clarity as it flows,

  In the company of runt flowers and herons,

  Around a bend at Islandbridge

  And under thirteen bridges to the sea.

  Its patience at twilight –

  Swans nesting by it,

  Neon wincing into it.

  Maker of

  Places, remembrances,

  Narrate such fragments for me:

  One body. One spirit.

  One place. One name.

  The city where I was born.

  The river that runs through it.

  The nation which eludes me.

  Fractions of a life

  It has taken me a lifetime

  To claim.

  I came here in a cold winter.

  I had no children. No country.

  I did not know the name for my own life.

  My country took hold of me.

  My children were born.

  I walked out in a summer dusk

  To call them in.

  One name. Then the other one.

  The beautiful vowels sounding out home.

  Make of a nation what you will

  Make of the past

  What you can –

  There is now

  A woman in a doorway.

  It has taken me

  All my strength to do this.

  Becoming a figure in a poem.

  Usurping a name and a theme.

  A river is not a woman.

  Although the names it finds,

  The history it makes

  And suffers –

  The Viking blades beside it,

  The muskets of the Redcoats,

  The flames of the Four Courts

  Blazing into it

  Are a sign.

  Any more than

  A woman is a river,

  Although the course it takes,

  Through swans courting and distraught willows,

  Its patience

  Which is also its powerlessness,

  From Callary to Islandbridge,

  And from source to mouth,

  Is another one.

  And in my late forties

  Past believing

  Love will heal

  What language fails to know

  And needs to say –

  What the body means –

  I take this sign

  And I make this mark:

  A woman in the doorway of her house.

  A river in the city of her birth.

  The truth of a suffered life.

  The mouth of it.

  The seabirds come in from the coast.

  The city wisdom is they bring rain.

  I watch them from my doorway.

  I see them as arguments of origin –

  Leaving a harsh force on the horizon

  Only to find it

  Slanting and falling elsewhere.

  Which water –

  The one they leave or the one they pronounce –

  Remembers the other?

  I am sure

  The body of an ageing woman

  Is a memory

  And to find a language for it

  Is as hard

  As weeping and requiring

  These birds to cry out as if they could

  Recognise their element

  Remembered and diminished in

  A single tear.

  An ageing woman

  Finds no shelter in language.

  She finds instead

  Single words she once loved

  Such as ‘summer’ and ‘yellow’

  And ‘sexual’ and ‘ready’

  Have suddenly become dwellings

  For someone else –

  Rooms and a roof under which someone else

  Is welcome, not her. Tell me,

  Anna Liffey,

  Spirit of water,

  Spirit of place,

  How is it on this

  Rainy autumn night

  As the Irish sea takes

  The names you made, the names

  You bestowed, and gives you back

  Only wordlessness?

  Autumn rain is

  Scattering and dripping

  From car-ports

  And clipped hedges.

  The gutters are full.

  When I came here

  I had neither

  Children nor country.

  The trees were arms.

  The hills were dreams.

  I was free

  To imagine a spirit

  In the blues and greens,

  The hills and fogs

  Of a small city.

  My children were born.

  My country took hold of me.

  A vision in a brick house.

  Is it only love

  That makes a place?

  I feel it change.

  My children are

  Growing up, getting older.

  My country holds on

  To its own pain.

  I turn off

  The harsh yellow

  Porch light and

  Stand in the hall.

  Where is home now?

  Follow the rain

  Out to the Dublin hills.

  Let it become the river.

  Let the spirit of place be

  A lost soul again.

  In the end

  It will not matter

  That I was a woman. I am sure of it.

  The body is a source. Nothing more.

  There is a time for it. There is a certainty

  About the way it seeks its own dissolution.

  Consider rivers.

  They are always en route to

  Their own nothingness. From the first moment

  They are going home. And so

  When language cannot do it for us,

  Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,

  There are these phrases

  Of the ocean

  To console us.

  Particular and unafraid of their completion.

  In the end

  Everything that burdened and distinguished me

  Will be lost in this:

  I was a voice.

  Time and Violence

  The evening was the same as any other.

  I came out and stood on the step.

  The suburb was closed in the weather

  of an early spring and the shallow tips

  and washed-out yellows of narcissi

  resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops.

  I stood there and felt the melancholy

  of growing older in such a season,

  when all I could be certain of was simply

  in this time of fragrance and refrain,

  whatever else might flower before the fruit,

  and be renewed, I would not. Not again.

  A car splashed by in the twilight.

  Peat smoke stayed in the windless

  air overhead and I might have missed it:

  a presence. Suddenly. In the very place

  where I would stand in other dusks, and look

  to pick out my child from the distance,

  was a shepherdess, her smile cracked,

  her arm injured from the mantelpieces

  and pastorals where she posed with her crook.

  Then I turned and saw in the spaces

  of the night sky constellations appear,

  one by one, over roof-tops and houses,

  and Cassiopeia trapped: stabbed where

  her thigh met her groin and her hand

  her glittering wrist, with the pin-point of a star.

  And by the road where rain made standing

  pools of water underneath cherry trees,

  and blossoms swam on their images,

  was a mermaid with in
vented tresses,

  her breasts printed with the salt of it and all

  the desolation of the North Sea in her face.

  I went nearer. They were disappearing.

  Dusk had turned to night but in the air –

  did I imagine it? – a voice was saying:

  This is what language did to us. Here

  is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness

  of tides and hillsides and stars where

  we languish in a grammar of sighs,

  in the high-minded search for euphony,

  in the midnight rhetoric of poesie.

  We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy.

  We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty.

  Help us to escape youth and beauty.

  Write us out of the poem. Make us human

  in cadences of change and mortal pain

  and words we can grow old and die in.

  A Woman Painted on a Leaf

  I found it among curios and silver,

  in the pureness of wintry light.

  A woman painted on a leaf.

  Fine lines drawn on a veined surface

  in a hand-made frame.

  This is not my face. Neither did I draw it.

  A leaf falls in a garden.

  The moon cools its aftermath of sap.

  The pith of summer dries out in starlight.

  A woman is inscribed there.

  This is not death. It is the terrible

  suspension of life.

  I want a poem

  I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.

  I want to take

  this dried-out face,

  as you take a starling from behind iron,

  and return it to its element of air, of ending –

 

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