by Eavan Boland
I N A T I M E O F V I O L E N C E
OTHER BOOKS BY EAVAN BOLAND
POETRY
New Territory
The War Horse
Night Feed
The Journey
Selected Poems: 1989
Outside History: Selected Poems 1980—1990
In a Time of Violence
An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967—1987
The Lost Land
PROSE
Object Lessons:
The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
In a Time
of
Violence
EAVAN BOLAND
W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y
N E W Y O R K / L O N D O N
Contents
Acknowledgements
THE SINGERS
I / Writing in a Time of Violence
1 THAT THE SCIENCE OF CARTOGRAPHY IS LIMITED
2 THE DEATH OF REASON
3 MARCH 1 1847.BY THE FIRST POST
4 IN A BAD LIGHT
5 THE DOLLS MUSEUM IN DUBLIN
6 INSCRIPTIONS
7 WRITING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE
II / Legends
THIS MOMENT
LOVE
THE POMEGRANATE
MOTHS
AT THE GLASS FACTORY IN CAVAN TOWN
A SPARROW HAWK IN THE SUBURBS
THE WATER CLOCK
IN WHICH THE ANCIENT HISTORY I LEARN IS NOT MY OWN
THE HUGUENOT GRAVEYARD AT THE HEART OF THE CITY
THE PARCEL
LAVA CAMEO
THE SOURCE
LEGENDS
III / Anna Liffey
ANNA LIFFEY
STORY
WHAT LANGUAGE DID
WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS WHO DO THIS
A WOMAN PAINTED ON A LEAF
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements are made to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems appeared, sometimes in a different form and with different titles.
The New Yorker “The Pomegranate”; “The Dolls Museum in Dublin”; “A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs”; “Love”; “The Water Clock” • The Paris Review “Inscriptions”; “At The Glass Factory in Cavan Town” • American Poetry Review “Anna Liffey” • The Atlantic “The Death of Reason” • The Partisan Review “In a Bad Light” • The Kenyon Review “What Language Did” • The Seneca Review “We Are the Only Animals Who Do This” • The Yale Review “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” • The New Republic “The Parcel” • Poetry “In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own” • PN Review and Poetry Ireland “At The Glass Factory in Cavan Town” • “Inscriptions” was included in the Pushcart Prize volume of 1992 and was published in The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1991 • “Lava Cameo” was awarded the Daniel Varoujan prize in 1992 by the New England Poetry Club and was published in Soho Square (1991) • “That the Science of Cartography is Limited” appeared in Poetry Review, also in New Poetry (Bloodaxe) 1993 and was awarded the bronze medal in the publication of Poetry Olympians (1992). It also appeared in Poetry Review.
I would like to thank the Ingram Merrill Foundation whose grant covered the period in which this book was written.
Several people were helpful in reading these poems. I would like to thank Kevin Casey and Jody Allen-Randolph for their comments. Also, Alice Quinn, Jill Bialosky, and Michael Schmidt.
I N A T I M E O F V I O L E N C E
THE SINGERS
for M.R.
The women who were singers in the West
lived on an unforgiving coast.
I want to ask was there ever one
moment when all of it relented,
when rain and ocean and their own
sense of home were revealed to them
as one and the same?
After which
every day was still shaped by weather,
but every night their mouths filled with
Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars
and exhausted birds.
And only when the danger
was plain in the music could you know
their true measure of rejoicing in
finding a voice where they found a vision.
I
Writing
in a
Time of Violence
A SEQUENCE
As in a city where the evil are permitted to have
authority and the good are put out of the way,
so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the
imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for
he indulges the irrational nature which has no
discernment of greater or less.
PLATO, The Republic, X
1 THAT THE SCIENCE OF CARTOGRAPHY IS LIMITED
—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
2 THE DEATH OF REASON
When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fires down in
the hayricks and seed-barns of a darkening Ireland,
the art of portrait-painting reached its height
across the water.
The fire caught.
The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold,
and the wind carried staves of a ballad:
The flesh-smell of hatred.
And she climbed the stairs. Nameless composite.
Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.
Rustling gun-coloured silks.
To set a seal on Augustan London.
And sat down.
The easel waits for her
and the age is ready to resemble her and
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 cabinetmaker 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 I 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 and I envy you.
Noone 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 crepe 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 I860. 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 crepe, 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 as 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 yachtclub terraces.
Put back the lamps in their copper holders.
The carriage wheels on the cobbled quays.
And re-create Easter in Dublin.
Booted officers. Their mistresses.
Sunlight crisscrossing 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 memorized 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 recognize
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 WRITING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE
I
n 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