New Selected Poems

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.