by Eavan Boland
4
We failed our moment or our moment failed us.
The times were grand in size and we were small.
Why do I write that
when I don’t believe it?
We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one.
Children were born and raised here
and are gone,
including ours.
As for that couple did we ever
find out who they were
and did we want to?
I think we know. I think we always knew.
2 How the Dance Came to the City
It came with the osprey, the cormorants, the air
at the edge of the storm, on the same route as
the blight and with the nightly sweats that said fever.
It came with the scarlet tunics and rowel-spurs,
with the epaulettes and their poisonous drizzle of gold,
with the boots, the gloves, the whips, the flash of the cuirasses.
It came with a sail riding the empire-blue haze
of the horizon growing closer, gaining and then
it was there: the whole creaking orchestra of salt and canvas.
And here is the cargo, deep in the hold of the ship,
stored with the coiled ropes and crated spice and coal,
the lumber and boredom of arrival, underneath
timbers shifting and clicking from the turnaround
of the tides locked at the mouth of Dublin Bay, is
the two-step, the quick step, the whirl, the slow return.
Tonight in rooms where skirts appear steeped in tea
when they are only deep in shadow and where heat
collects at the waist, the wrist, is wet at the base of the neck,
the secrets of the dark will be the truths of the body
a young girl feels and hides even from herself as she lets fall
satin from her thighs to her ankles, as she lets herself think
how it started, just where: with the minuet, the quadrille,
the chandeliers glinting, the noise wild silk makes and
her face flushed and wide-eyed in the mirror of his sword.
3 How It Was Once In Our Country
In those years I owned a blue plate,
blue from the very edges to the centre,
ocean-blue, the sort of under-wave blue
a mermaid could easily dive down into and enter.
When I looked at the plate I saw the mouth
of a harbour, an afternoon without a breath
of air, the evening clear all the way to Howth
and back, the sky a paler blue further to the south.
Consider the kind of body that enters blueness,
made out of dead-end myth and mischievous
whispers of an old, borderless
existence where the body’s meaning is both more and less.
Sea-trawler, land-siren: succubus to all the dreams
land has of ocean, of its old home.
She must have witnessed deaths. Of course she did.
Some say she stayed down there to escape the screams.
4 Still Life
William Harnett was a famous realist.
He went from Clonakilty to Philadelphia
in the aftermath of Famine. In
the same year the London Illustrated News
printed an etching of a woman.
On one arm was a baby – rigid, still.
In her other hand was a small dish.
They called it Woman Begging at Clonakilty.
I believe the surfaces of things
can barely hold in what is under them.
He became a painter.
He painted objects and instruments, household and musical.
He laid them on canvases with surfaces and textures
no light could exit from.
He painted his Cremona violin as if only he knew
the skin tones of spruce wood.
I drove through Clonakilty in early spring
when the air was tinged with a colour close to vinegar,
a sure sign of rain,
past the corn store and the old linen mill,
down Long Quay.
I looked back at fields, at the air extracting
the essence of stillness from the afternoon.
(The child, of course, was dead.)
5 Silenced
In the ancient, gruesome story, Philomel
was little more than an ordinary girl.
She went away with her sister, Procne. Then
her sister’s husband, Tereus, given to violence,
raped her once
and said he required her silence
forever. When she whispered but
he finished it all and had her tongue cut out.
Afterwards, she determined to tell her story
another way. She began a tapestry.
She gathered skeins, colours.
She started weaving.
She was weaving alone, in fact, and so intently
she never saw me enter.
An Irish sky was unfolding its wintry colours
slowly over my shoulder. An old radio
was there in the room as well, telling its own
unregarded story of violation.
Now she is rinsing the distances
with greenish silks. Now, for the terrible foreground,
she is pulling out crimson thread.
6 Histories
That was the year the news was always bad
(statistics on the radio)
the sad
truth no less so for being constantly repeated.
That was the year my mother was outside
in the shed
in her apron with the strings tied
twice behind her back and the door left wide.
7 Wisdom
The air hoarded frost. The lilac was a ghost
of lilac. It was eerie and expectant, both.
Metal touched clay, grated against stone. It was all
detailed, slow. Cigarettes were lit, there was laughter.
They were digging up an era, a city, my life.
They were using spades, machines, their wits.
I was standing there watching, on
a dry night in a small town in Ireland.
In this place, archaeology was not a science,
nor a search for the actual, nor a painstaking
catalogue of parts and bone fragments, but
an art of memory and this, I thought, is how
legends have been, and will always be, edited –
not by saying them, but by unsettling
one layer of meaning from another and
another, and now they were pulling up something,
pushing its surface back into the world,
lifting it clear of its first funeral, moonlight
catching it, making it seem as if
it was swimming in and out of those gleams,
promising, disappearing. Then
I saw what it was – a plate, a round utensil,
a common flatness on which was served every day
the sustenance and restitution
of who we were once,
its substance braided with the dust of everything
that had happened since.
There was silence. No one looked up. Or spoke.
And then I knew I needed to tell you something:
The salmon of knowledge was fat and slick,
a sliver of freckles in the shallow water
and sought-after reflections of our old legends.
The hero ate the flesh and was wiser.
I wanted to say that to you. Then I woke.
8 Irish Interior
The woman sits and spins. She makes no sound.
The man behind her stands by the door.
There is always this: a background, a foreground.
This much we know. They do not w
ant to be here.
The year is 1890. The inks have long since dried.
The name of the drawing is An Irish interior.
The year is 1890. Before the inks are dry
Parnell will fall and orchards burn where the two
Captains – Moonlight, Boycott – have had their way.
She has a spinning wheel. He has a loom.
She has a shawl. He stands beside a landscape –
maybe a river, maybe hills, maybe even a farm
opening into a distance of water-song and a wood
they cannot reach: nothing belongs to them but this
melody and tyranny and hopelessness of thread
rendered by linework and the skewed perspective
the eye attains between his hand and the way
her hand rests on the wheel which goes to prove
only this: that there is always near and far, as
she works in one. He weaves inside the other.
Which we are in has yet to be made clear as
we stare through the lines until their lives
have almost disappeared and all we see, all
we want to see, are places in the picture light forgives,
such as the grain of the wood and the close seal of
the thread at the top of the loom and a door opening
into an afternoon they can never avail of.
9 In Our Own Country
They are making a new Ireland
at the end of our road,
under our very eyes,
under the arc lamps they aim and beam
into distances where we once lived
into vistas we will never recognise.
We are here to watch.
We are looking for new knowledge.
They have been working here in all weathers
tearing away the road to our village –
bridge, path, river, all
lost under an onslaught of steel.
An old Europe
has come to us as a stranger in our city,
has forgotten its own music, wars and treaties,
is now a machine from the Netherlands or Belgium
dragging, tossing, breaking apart the clay
in which our timid spring used to arrive
with our daffodils in a single, crooked row.
Remember the emigrant boat?
Remember the lost faces burned in the last glances?
The air clearing away to nothing, nothing, nothing.
Construction work is finished for the night.
The barriers are pulled across the walkway.
They hang a sign on them. It reads no entry.
We pull our collars tightly round our necks
but the wind finds our throats,
predatory and wintry.
We walk home. What we know is this
(and this is all we know): We are now
and we will always be from now on –
for all I know we have always been –
exiles in our own country.
Letters to the Dead
An Elegy for my Mother In Which She Scarcely Appears
I knew we had to grieve for the animals
a long time ago: weep for them, pity them.
I knew it was our strange human duty
to write their elegies after we arranged their demise.
I was young then and able for the paradox.
I am older now and ready with the question:
What happened to them all? I mean to those
old dumb implements which have
no eyes to plead with us like theirs,
no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean –
there was a singing kettle. I want to know
why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin
base of its extinct design or crouched to hear
its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with
the birds in their blue sleeves of air
torn away with the trees that sheltered them.
And there were brass firedogs which lay out
all evening on the grate and in the heat
thrown at them by the last of the peat fire
but no one noted down their history or put them
in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight.
There was a wooden clothes horse, absolutely steady
without sinews, with no mane and no meadows
to canter in; carrying, instead of
landlords or Irish monks, rinsed tea cloths
but still, I would have thought, worth adding to
the catalogue of what we need, what we always need
as is my mother, on this Dublin evening of
fog crystals and frost as she reaches out to test
one corner of a cloth for dryness as the prewar
Irish twilight closes in and down on the room
and the curtains are drawn and here am I,
not even born and already a conservationist,
with nothing to assist me but the last
and most fabulous of beasts – language, language –
which knows, as I do, that it’s too late
to record the loss of these things but does so anyway,
and anxiously, in case it shares their fate.
Amber
It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:
trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping –
a plastic gold dropping
through seasons and centuries to the ground –
until now.
On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent
I am holding, as if my hand could store it,
an ornament of amber
you once gave me.
Reason says this:
The dead cannot see the living.
The living will never see the dead again.
The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet
this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell
which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were
as though the past could be present and memory itself
a Baltic honey –
a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much
can be kept safe
inside a flawed translucence.
And Soul
My mother died one summer –
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Empty deckchairs collected rain.
As I took my way to her
through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly
behind houses
and on curbsides, to pay her
the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something
I remembered
I heard once that the body is, or is
said to be, almost all
water and as I turned southward, that ours is
a city of it
one in which
every single day the elements begin
a journey towards each other that will never,
given our weather,
fail –
the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,
cloud colour reaching into air,
the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,
salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and
as if that wasn’t enough, all of it
ending up almost every evening
inside our speech –
coast canal ocean river stream and now
mother and I drove on and although
the mind is unreliable in grief at
the next cloudburst it almost seemed
they could be shades of each other,
the way the body is
of every one of them and now
they were on the move again – fog into mist,
mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze
that lay on the railings of
the house she was dying in
as I went inside.
On This Earth
We walk in sunshine to the Musée Marmottan. There,
on the wall opposite, I want to show you
Julie Manet
wearing her mother’s brushstrokes,
clothed in the ochres of decorum, the hot bonnets
and silks of that century.
Hard to believe as we cross the road – the grass
dry, cropped and exhausted – that there was ever
a flood on this earth.
We leave the museum and go to a nearby café.
In the harsh noon light your cheeks are flushed.
The line is not perfect.
My first daughter you were my dove, my summer,
my skies lifting, my waters retreating,
my covenant with the earth.
Letters to the Dead
I
In the Old Kingdom scholars found pottery
written round and around with signs and marks.
II
Written in silt ware. On the rims of bowls.
Laid at the entrance to tombs.
Red with the iron of one world.
Set at the threshold of another.