by Eavan Boland
recognize. 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
crepe 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.
THE SOURCE
The adults stood
making sounds of disappointment.
We were high up in the Wicklow hills,
in a circle of whins and lilacs.
We were looking for the source of a river.
We never found it.
Instead, we drove to its northern edge.
And there the river leaned into the afternoon—
all light, all intrusion—
the way a mirror interrupts a room.
See me kneeling in a room
whose boundary
is fog and the dusk of a strange city.
The mirror shows a child in bad light.
From the inlaid box I lift up something
closed in tissue paper.
My mother’s hair. A whole coil of it.
It is the colour of corn harvested in darkness.
As the light goes,
I hold in my hand the coarse weight and
hopeless safe-keeping
and there comes back to me
the dialect of the not-found.
Maybe. Nearly. It could almost be.
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 retell 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 flatlands 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
Retelling 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.
Anymore 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,
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
Recognize 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 carports
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 dissoloution.
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.
STORY
Two lovers in an Irish wood at dusk
are hiding from an old and vengeful king.
The wood is full of sycamore and elder.
And set in that nowhere which is anywhere:
And let the woman be slender. As I was at twenty.
And red-haired. As I was until recently.
They cling together listening to his hounds
get nearer in the twilight and the spring
thickets fill with the sound of danger.
Blossoms are the colour of blood and capture.
We can be safe, they say. We can start
a rumour in the wood to reach the king—
that she has lost her youth. That her mouth is
cold. That this woman is growing older.
They do not know. They have no idea
how much of this: the ocean-coloured peace
of the dusk, and the way legend stresses it,
depend on her to be young and beautiful.
They start the rumour in the last light.
But the light changes. The distance shudders.
And suddenly what is happening is not
what happens to the lovers in the wood
or an angry king and his frantic hounds—
and the tricks and kisses he has planned.
But what is whispering out of sycamores.
And over river-noise. And bypasses harebells
and blue air. And is overheard by the birds
which are the elements of logic in an early
spring. And is travelling to enter a suburb
at the foothills of the mountains in Dublin.
And a garden with jasmine and poplars. And
a table at which I am writing. I am writing
a woman out of legend. I am thinking
how new it is—this story. How hard it will be to tell.
WHAT LANGUAGE DID
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 invented 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.
WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS WHO DO THIS
I saw a statue yesterday. A veiled woman.
Head and shoulders only. Up on a pedestal.
A veil of grief covering her whole face.
I stood there, caught by surprise, my
car keys getting warmer in one hand,
both of us women in our middle years,
but hers were fixed, set and finished in
a mutton-fat creaminess, a seamless flutter in
marble revealed by a sudden brightness
from the window behind me and other parts
were as dark as the shell of a. swan mussel.
I saw my mother weep once. It was under
circumstances I can never, even now,
weave into or reveal by these cadences.
As I watched, and I was younger then,
I could see that weeping itself has no cadence.
It is unrhythmical, unpredictable and
the intake of breath one sob needs to
become another sob, so one tear can succeed
another, is unmusical: whoever the muse is
or was of weeping, she has put the sound of it
beyond the reach of metric-makers, music-makers.
I went up to her. At the well
of the throat where tears start,
there the artist must have started,
I was sure of it. From there upwards—
chin, lips, skin lines, eyelids—all
had been chiselled out with the veil in
the same, indivisible act of definition
which had silenced her. No sound. Not one.
No dissonance of grief in a small room on
a summer evening. Just a mineral grace
in which she had found a rhythm to weep by.
The rhythm of summer was unstoppable: a rapt
heat waited for the blackbird to say dusk
is coming, is about to be, will be able to
fold the ladysmock, cowslips and the grey
undertips of the mulberry leaves into that
translucence which is all darkness can be in
this season. The room was curtained, quiet.
We sat at right angles. I knew the late
sun would never make the cinnamon-and-
chintz pansies on those armrests grow
more or perish there. And my mother wept.
An object of the images we make is
what we are and how we lean out and
over the perfect surface where
our features in water greet and save us.
No weeping there: only the element
claiming its emblem. A last wheat-coloured
brightness filled the room. She dried her tears.
She put one hand up to her throat and pulled,
between her thumb and forefinger, the rope
of light there. “Did you know” she said
“some people say that pearls are tears?”
I could not ask her, she could not tell me
why something had once made her weep.
Had made her cover up her mouth and eyes