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Page 12

by Eavan Boland


  listening to our child crying, as if to birdsong,

  with ice on the windowsills

  and the grass eking out

  the last crooked hour of starlight.

  X A Marriage for the Millennium

  Do you believe

  that Progress is a woman?

  A spirit seeking for its opposite?

  For a true marriage to ease her quick heartbeat?

  I asked you this

  as you sat with your glass of red wine

  and your newspaper of yesterday’s events.

  You were drinking and reading, and did not hear me.

  Then I closed the door

  and left the house behind me and began

  driving the whole distance of our marriage,

  away from the suburb towards the city.

  One by one

  the glowing windows went out.

  Television screens cooled down more slowly.

  Ceramic turned to glass, circuits to transistors.

  Old rowans were saplings.

  Roads were no longer wide.

  Children disappeared from their beds.

  Wives, without warning, suddenly became children.

  Computer games became codes again.

  The codes were folded

  back into the futures of their makers.

  Their makers woke from sleep, weeping for milk.

  When I came to the street we once lived on

  with its iron edges out of another century

  I stayed there only a few minutes.

  Then I was in the car, driving again.

  I was ready to tell you when I got home

  that high above that street in a room

  above the laid-out hedges and wild lilac

  nothing had changed

  them, nothing ever would.

  The man with his creased copy of the newspaper.

  Or the young woman talking to him. Talking to him.

  Her heart eased by this.

  XI Lines for a Thirtieth Wedding Anniversary

  Somewhere up in the eaves it began.

  High in the roof – in a sort of vault

  between the slates and gutter – a small leak.

  Through it, rain which came from the east,

  in from the lights and foghorns of the coast,

  water with a ghost of ocean salt in it,

  spilled down on the path below

  over and over and over years

  stone began to alter,

  its grain searched out, worn in:

  granite rounding down, giving way

  taking into its own inertia that

  information water brought – of ships,

  wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.

  It happened under our lives, the rain,

  the stone. We hardly noticed. Now

  this is the day to think of it, to wonder.

  All those years, all those years together –

  the stars in a frozen arc overhead,

  the quick noise of a thaw in the air,

  the blue stare of the hills – through it all

  this constancy: what wears, what endures.

  II Code

  Code

  An Ode to Grace Murray Hopper 1906–88 maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL

  Poet to poet. I imagine you

  at the edge of language, at the start of summer

  in Wolfeboro New Hampshire, writing code.

  You have no sense of time. No sense of minutes even.

  They cannot reach inside your world,

  your grey workstation,

  with when yet now never and once.

  You have missed the other seven.

  This is the eighth day of creation.

  The peacock has been made, the rivers stocked.

  The rainbow has leaned down to clothe the trout.

  The earth has found its pole, the moon its tides.

  Atoms, energies have done their work,

  have made the world, have finished it, have rested.

  And we call this Creation. And you missed it.

  The line of my horizon, solid blue

  appears at last fifty years away

  from your fastidious, exact patience:

  The first sign that night will be day

  is a stir of leaves in this Dublin suburb

  and air and invertebrates and birds,

  as the earth resorts again

  to its explanations:

  Its shadows. Its reflections. Its words.

  You are west of me and in the past.

  Dark falls. Light is somewhere else.

  The fireflies come out above the lake.

  You are compiling binaries and zeroes.

  The given world is what you can translate.

  And you divide the lesser from the greater.

  Let there be language –

  even if we use it differently:

  I never made it timeless as you have.

  I never made it numerate as you did.

  And yet I use it here to imagine

  how at your desk in the twilight

  legend, history and myth of course,

  are gathering in Wolfeboro New Hampshire,

  as if to a memory. As if to a source.

  Maker of the future, if the past

  is fading from view with the light

  outside your window and the single file

  of elements and animals, and all the facts

  of origin and outcome, which will never find

  their way to you or shelter in your syntax –

  it makes no difference:

  We are still human. There is still light

  in my suburb and you are in my mind –

  head bowed, old enough to be my mother –

  writing code before the daylight goes.

  I am writing at a screen as blue

  as any hill, as any lake, composing this

  to show you how the world begins again:

  One word at a time.

  One woman to another.

  Limits

  So high

  in their leafy silence

  over Kells, over Durrow

  as the Vikings

  raged south –

  the old monks

  made the alphabet

  wild:

  they dipped iron

  into azure and

  indigo: they gave strange

  wings to their o’s

  and e’s: their vowels

  clung on with

  talons and the thin,

  ribbed wolves

  which had gone north

  left their frozen winters

  and were lured back

  to their consonants.

  Limits 2

  If there was

  a narrative to my life

  in those years, then

  let this

  be the sound of it –

  the season in, season out

  sound of

  the grind of

  my neighbours’ shears.

  Beautiful air of August,

  music of limitation, of

  the clipped

  shadow and

  the straightened border,

  of rain on the Dublin hills,

  of my children sleeping in

  a simpler world:

  an iron edge

  the origin of order.

  How We Made a New Art on Old Ground

  A famous battle happened in this valley.

  You never understood the nature poem.

  Till now. Till this moment – if these statements

  seem separate, unrelated, follow this

  silence to its edge and you will hear

  the history of air: the crispness of a fern

  or the upward cut and turn around of

  a fieldfare or thrush written on it.

  The other history is silent: the estuary

  is over there. The issue was de
cided here:

  Two kings prepared to give no quarter.

  Then one king and one dead tradition.

  Now the humid dusk, the old wounds

  wait for language, for a different truth:

  When you see the silk of the willow

  and the wider edge of the river turn

  and grow dark and then darker, then

  you will know that the nature poem

  is not the action nor its end: it is

  this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

  the cattle grid underneath our feet,

  on the steering wheel shaft: it is

  an aftermath, an overlay and even in

  its own modest way, an art of peace:

  I try the word distance and it fills with

  sycamores, a summer’s worth of pollen.

  And as I write valley straw, metal

  blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.

  Silence spreads slowly from these words

  to those ilex trees half in, half out

  of shadows falling on the shallow ford

  of the south bank beside Yellow Island

  as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion

  begins to be complete: what we see

  is what the poem says:

  evening coming – cattle, cattle-shadows –

  and whin bushes and a change of weather

  about to change them all: what we see is how

  the place and the torment of the place are

  for this moment free of one another.

  Making Money

  At the turn of the century, the paper produced there was of such high quality that it was exported for use as bank-note paper.

  ‘Dundrum and its Environs’

  They made money –

  maybe not the way

  you think it should be done

  but they did it anyway.

  At the end of summer

  the rains came and braided

  the river Slang as it ran down and down

  the Dublin mountains and into faster water

  and stiller air as if a storm was coming in.

  And the mill wheel turned so the mill

  could make paper and the paper money.

  And the cottage doors opened and the women

  came out in the ugly first hour

  after dawn and began

  to cook the rags they put

  hemp waste, cotton lint, linen, flax and fishnets

  from boxes delivered every day on

  the rag wagon on a rolling boil. And the steam rose

  up from the open coils where a shoal slipped through

  in an April dawn. And in the backwash they added

  alkaline and caustic and soda ash and suddenly

  they were making money.

  A hundred years ago

  this is the way they came to the plum-brown

  headlong weir and the sedge drowned in it

  and their faces about to be as they looked down

  once quickly on

  their way to the mill, to the toil

  of sifting and beating and settling and fraying

  the weighed-out fibres. And they see how easily

  the hemp has forgotten the Irish sea at

  neap tide and how smooth the weave is now in

  their hands. And they do not and they never will

  see the small boundaries all this will buy

  or the poisoned kingdom with its waterways

  and splintered locks or the peacocks who will walk

  this paper up and down in the windless gardens

  of a history no one can stop happening now.

  Nor the crimson and indigo features

  of the prince who will stare out from

  the surfaces they have made on

  the ruin of a Europe

  he cannot see from the surface

  of a wealth he cannot keep

  if you can keep

  your composure in the face of this final proof that

  the past is not made out of time, out of memory,

  out of irony but is also

  a crime we cannot admit and will not atone

  it will be dawn again in the rainy autumn of the year.

  The air will be a skinful of water –

  the distance between storms –

  again. The wagon of rags will arrive.

  The foreman will buy it. The boxes will be lowered to the path

  the women are walking up

  as they always did, as they always will now.

  Facing the paradox. Learning to die of it.

  Exile! Exile!

  All night the room breathes out its grief.

  Exhales through surfaces. The sideboard.

  The curtains. The stale air stalled there.

  The kiln-fired claws of the china bird.

  This is the hour when every ornament

  unloads its atoms of pretence. Stone.

  Brass. Bronze. What they represent is

  set aside in the dark. They become again

  a spacious morning in the Comeraghs.

  An iron gate; a sudden downpour; a well in

  the corner of a farmyard; a pool of rain

  into which an Irish world has fallen.

  Out there the Americas stretch to the horizons.

  They burn in the cities and darken over wheat.

  They go to the edge, to the rock, to the coast,

  to where the moon abrades a shabby path eastward.

  O land of opportunity, you are

  not the suppers with meat, nor

  the curtains with lace nor the unheard of

  fire in the grate on summer afternoons, you are

  this room, this dish of fruit which

  has never seen its own earth. Or had rain

  fall on it all one night and the next. And has grown,

  in consequence, a fine, crazed skin of porcelain.

  Is It Still the Same

  young woman who climbs the stairs,

  who closes a child’s door,

  who goes to her table

  in a room at the back of a house?

  The same unlighted corridor?

  The same night air

  over the wheelbarrows and rain-tanks?

  The same inky sky and pin-bright stars?

  You can see nothing of her, but her head

  bent over the page, her hand moving,

  moving again, and her hair.

  I wrote like that once.

  But this is different.

  This time, when she looks up, I will be there.

  Irish Poetry

  for Michael Hartnett

  We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.

  No music stored at the doors of hell.

  No god to make it.

  No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.

  But I remember an evening when the sky

  was underworld-dark at four,

  when ice had seized every part of the city

  and we sat talking –

  the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.

  And you began to speak of our own gods.

  Our heartbroken pantheon.

  No Attic light for them and no Herodotus.

  But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap

  of the sharp cliffs

  they spent their winters on.

  And the pitch-black Atlantic night.

  How the sound

  of a bird’s wing in a lost language sounded.

  You made the noise for me.

  Made it again.

  Until I could see the flight of it: suddenly

  the silvery lithe rivers of the south-west

  lay down in silence

  and the savage acres no one could predict

  were all at ease, soothed and quiet and

  listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.

  from DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

  2007

  Do
mestic Violence

  1 Domestic Violence

  1

  It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk

  pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.

  Pleased to meet you meat to please you

  said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.

  Everything changed the year that we got married.

  And after that we moved out to the suburbs.

  How young we were, how ignorant, how ready

  to think the only history was our own.

  And there was a couple who quarrelled into the night,

  their voices high, sharp:

  nothing is ever entirely

  right in the lives of those who love each other.

  2

  In that season suddenly our island

  broke out its old sores for all to see.

  We saw them too.

  We stood there wondering how

  the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,

  the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes

  we thought we knew

  had been made to shiver

  into our ancient twelve by fifteen television

  which gave them back as grey and greyer tears

  and killings, killings, killings,

  then moonlight-coloured funerals:

  nothing we said

  not then, not later,

  fathomed what it is

  is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.

  3

  And if the provenance of memory is

  only that – remember, not atone –

  and if I can be safe in

  the weak spring light in that kitchen, then

  why is there another kitchen, spring light

  always darkening in it and

  a woman whispering to a man

  over and over what else could we have done?

 

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