by Eavan Boland
The sort of wound a man might imitate forever.
And seeing hacked limbs, I was their screams,
Their first spasm of terror. But I was his dreams
Also as, victim to his victim,
He saw himself split again
And turned away alone,
Forever puzzled. “He will kill again of course,”
I said. He smiled and sneered. “I am
The traveler after all. You can’t have known
How hard it is to get a good horse.”
The Laws of Love
(FOR MARY ROBINSON)
At first light the legislator
Who schooled you, creator
Of each force, each element,
Its secret law, its small print
Nature—while dawn, baptismal as waters
which broke early in dark, began—
First saw the first of your daughters
Become in your arms a citizen.
How easy for you to have made
For her a perfumed stockade,
How easy for you to impose
Laws and structures, torts for those
Fragments which matter less and less
As all fragments, and we must bless
The child, its murderer, defend
This chaos somehow which must end
With order. But who can separate
Hatred from its opposite
Or judge which is the other’s source
Today? Unless perhaps that force
Which makes your Moy in its ridge pool
Prime teenage trout for butchery,
While at the same time fulfill
The blood-tie of the tide, as we
Once new found sisters, each grown miser
With new found blood began to trade
Salmond for Shakespeare—none the wiser
Then but now I see it focus
Slowly—a miracle, a closing wound.
That sisters kill, that sisters die, must mock us
Now, unless, with separate speech we find
For them new blood, for them now plead
Another world for whose horizons,
For whose anguish no reprieve
Exists unless new citizens,
And, as we found, the laws of love—
We two whose very first words fell
Like wishes down a wishing well,
Ungranted, had we known, unwanted
Yet still there as the well is, haunted.
Sisters
(FOR NESSA MY OWN)
Now it is winter and the hare
Imitates the hillside snow,
Crouches in his frame of ice,
The dormouse in his wheel of fur,
While in caves hour by hour
The bat glistens in reverse.
Snowdrops poised for assassination
Broadcast, white in the face, the stress
Of first bursting out of a prison
Where winter grips the warder’s keys
By day then, at the dusk’s tilt,
Loops them to Orion’s belt.
In Monkstown bay a young seal
Surfaces, sleuth hound of herring;
Gulls shriek as he steals their meal
But I, getting the hint of spring,
As a fisherman an Armada hull,
Welcome his unexpected skull
For you, as his outline through
The spring tide comes to view;
Spring to mind. In such disguise
Our love survived as the sea with ease
Becomes with granite a graphic twin
Tumbling like a harlequin.
At seven years, the age of reason,
The ready child communicates
With Christ, according to our church.
Seven years ago, in the silly season,
And for such reasons, our two hearts
Were put outside each other’s reach.
The fable goes, becoming warmer
Every second against his breast:
Christ’s blood created the first informer,
The robin redbreast. And still the thirst
For knowledge and blood, they still remain,
And still we turn to still the pain.
O and my sister, not a sound,
Could find its way into this silence,
Nor intervene where you have found
In one stunned heart, which must now trounce
Breaking, if not a breathing space,
Well then a sister’s grim embrace.
And in your ear a final Word—
That we remember all our pain
Has saved us from a final fate,
One worse than death. Has left us scarred
But strangely safe for we remain
From these others separate.
The three harridans who toy
With human life, who in the cut
And thrust of gossip, never
Noticed one untwisted joy,
One sisterhood and could not sever
Ours with a chill and idle gesture.
II
O Fons Bandusiae
(Horace 3:XIII)
Bold as crystal, bright as glass,
Your waters leap while we appear
Carrying to your woodland shrine
Gifts below your worthiness,
Grape and flower, Bandusia,
Yellow hawksbeard, ready wine.
And tomorrow we will bring
A struggling kid, his temples sore
With early horns, as sacrifice.
Tomorrow his new trumpeting
Will come to nothing, when his gore
Stains and thaws your bright ice.
Canicula, the lamp of drought,
The summer’s fire, leaves your grace
Inviolate in the woods where
Everyday you spring to comfort
The broad bull in his trace,
The herd out of the shepherd’s care.
With every fountain, every spring
Of legend, I will set you down
In praise and immortal spate:
These waters which drop gossiping
To ground, this wet surrounding stone
And this green oak I celebrate.
Chorus of the Shadows
(after Nelly Sachs)
Puppets we are, strung by a puppet master.
He knows the theater of the absurd. He understands
Murder too well. Outrage. Grief. Disaster.
He puts the show on in hell. By his permission
We are moths fired and turned on his obsession.
His hands,
Are pinned to the dust. They darken the hangman’s threats,
Give depth to the noose and our dimensions greet him,
The victim, as he plummets. No wonder we are
Weary of our own silhouettes.
Now we are driven to it, now we deliver
An ultimatum
To the planet which scripts our part. Take away
Light and we will not undertake love
Any longer. Give us a new part to play
In the day of a child or a stake in the luck—the frail
Perfect luck—of a dragonfly above
The rim of a well.
From the Irish of Pangur Ban
(FOR MAIRIN)
Myself and Pangur, cat and sage
Go each about our business;
I harrass my beloved page,
He his mouse.
Fame comes second to the peace
Of study, a still day.
Unenvious, Pangur’s choice
Is child’s play.
Neither bored, both hone
At home a separate skill,
Moving, after hours alone,
To the kill.
And when at last his net wraps,
After a sly fight,
Around a mouse, mine traps
Sudden insight.
On my cell wall here,
His sight fixes. Burning.
Searching. My old eyes peer
At new learning.
His delight when his claws
Close on his prey
Equals mine, when sudden clues
Light my way.
So we find by degrees
Peace in solitude,
Both of us—solitaries—
Have each the trade
He loves, Pangur, never idle
Day or night
Hunts mice. I hunt each riddle
From dark to light.
The Atlantic Ocean
(after Mayakovsky)
This stone, this Spanish stone, flings light
Like acid in my eyes. Walls splice the day.
Our freighter chokes, then belches anthracite,
Fresh water up by noon. We are away.
A shrivelled Europe faces
Starboard. Our guzzling boat
Bloats on fish, swallows, chases
The anchor down its throat.
Waves are conjurors, splashes sleeves,
Up which aces of past and future hide.
One man finds love, another what he grieves
By watching. To me they are another side
Of life, not one to do
With retrospect or manners
But with the ballyhoo
Of war, the hoist of banners.
Out of this ocean now, its menacing storms,
Out of its cryptic structures, its tribal
Tides, out of its secret order, from the cabal
Of trade wind and water, look, a Soviet forms!
A squad of drops batters
The sky for a second, wears
Out its force, then turns and tears
Each imperial crest to tatters.
The waves are agitating now, the sea
Itself becomes the theater of the battle.
Lesser waves congregate, they settle
On a policy for all. All agree
Not to abandon their will
To fight, their fierce airs
Their stormy posture until
Victory is theirs.
So what has started well can flourish still,
As for example, underneath the tide
The marvel of structured self-perfecting coral—
Now a milestone, soon to be a guide
To the she-whale, the sperm-whale nosing
Clear of the shark, the porpoises
Braceleting the ships’ bows.
The octopus intricately dozing.
No wonder it beats like an alternate heart in me,
No wonder its drops fill and fall from my eyes
In familiar drops. It’s in the family.
At last I see, at last I recognize
In its wild station,
Its ice and riot, its other
Prowess, of my revolution
The elder brother.
Conversation with an Inspector of Taxes about Poetry
(after Mayakovsky)
No, Comrade Inspector, I won’t sit down.
Thank you. Forgive me taking your time.
What a delicate matter this business of mine
Is! The more difficult since I am
Concerned to discern the role of the poet
Within the ranks of the proletariat.
If you knew how you’ve added to my troubles
Taxing me like a shopkeeper or kulak!
For six months you claim five hundred rubles.
And twenty-five for the forms I didn’t send back.
But I work as hard as the rest. Look what I’ve lost
In production. See what my materials cost.
Perhaps I should explain it in your idiom.
What you would call a promissory note
Is roughly the equivalent of a rhyme
To us, owed to each and every alternate
Line. And then in the petty cash of sense
We moisten the coins of nuance.
Suppose I select a word to go
Into a line. It doesn’t fit. I start
To force it. The next thing I know
The seams of the stanza strain apart.
Comrade Inspector, I can give
Assurances that words are expensive.
I revert now to poetic license:
Metaphorically speaking my rhyming
Is a keg of dynamite, my lines
Smolder towards it. Then the timing
Device detonates and finally
The whole poem blows sky high.
Accusing me from your questionnaire
I see Have you traveled in the course
Of business? But what if every year
I’ve bitted and stampeded Pegasus
Till both of us were worn? Have sense.
Take into account the following instance.
There may be in Venezuela five
Or six sweet rhymes undiscovered.
If in pursuit of them I have
Tax to pay on travel, then my fevered
Search would draw too mean a loan
For poetry to sack the unknown.
Considering all this will you allow
Me a small mercenary reprieve?
I’ll accept an inch of clay, a plow.
I’ll be a peasant. Otherwise I achieve
So little by this speech that its effect,
Nil on you, on me I expect,
Will be years from now, I am sure,
These lines like ones in a puppet show,
Will jerk you back, inking your signature
On final demands. So, Comrade, so
I will have guaranteed your encore
Years after I have died and lie a pauper—
Crushed not by you bureaucrat
Though your claims are irritating, true,
But by the vast claims on a poet
I could not meet. All my debts to you
Are those of any chance financial sinner
But these to follow are my debts of honor:
To the Red Army, boiling across frontiers
In a wash of Cossack stallions, coats
Threaded from goat hide, unshaved hairs
Masking them like bandits, their supporters
Cheering them as the musket shots
Ventilated each of their deserters.
To the winter flowering cherry of Japan,
Frail as a foundling which never found
In my verse even the shelter given
To it by the snows which surround
Its blossom stealthily as rags are heaped
Over a sprawled vagrant while he sleeps.
Finally I know myself indebted,
Beyond anything I can return,
To the fastness of my winter cradle.
Because somehow I never celebrated
Its bleak skies. To this day they remain
Unsung and my tongue is idle.
III
Ode to Suburbia
Six o’clock: the kitchen bulbs
which blister Your dark, your housewives starting to nose
Out each other’s day, the claustrophobia
Of your back gardens varicose
With shrubs, make an ugly sister
Of you suburbia.
How long ago did the glass in your windows subtly
Silver into mirrors which again
And again show the same woman
Shriek at a child? Which multiply
A dish, a brush, ash,
The gape of a fish.
In the kitchen, the gape of a child in the cot?
You swelled so that when you tried
The silver slipper on your foot
It pinched your instep and the common
Hurt which touched you made
You human.
No creature of the streets will feel the touch
Of a wand turning the wet sinews
Of fruit suddenly to a coach,
While this rat without leather reins
Or a whip or britches continues
Sliming your drains.
No magic here. Yet you encroach until
The shy countryside, fooled
By your plainness, falls, then rises
From your bed changed, schooled
Forever by your skill,
Your compromises.
Midnight and your metamorphosis
Is now complete, although the mind
Which spinstered you might still miss
Your mystery now, might still fail
To see your power defined
By this detail.
By this creature drowsing now in every house—
The same lion who tore stripes
Once off zebras. Who now sleeps,
Small beside the coals. And may
On a red letter day
Catch a mouse.
Naoise at Four
The trap baited for them snaps.
like forest pests they fall for it,
like humans writhe, like both submit.
Three brothers die: their three saps
spill until their split kith
heals into an Irish myth
Naoise, named for one of these,
you stand in our kitchen, sip
milk from a plastic cup
from our cupboard. Our unease
vanishes with one smile
as each suburban, modern detail
distances us from old lives.
Yet every night on our screens
new ones are lost. Wounds open.
Nothing heals. And what perspective
on this sudden Irish fury
can solve it to a folk memory?
Cyclist with Cut Branches
Country hands on the handlebars,
A bicycle bisecting cars
Lethal and casual
In rush hour traffic, I remember
Seeing, as I watched that September
For you as usual.
Like rapid mercury abused
By summer heat where it is housed
In slender telling glass
My heart taking grief’s temperature
That summer, lost its powers to cure,
Its gift to analyze.
Jasmine and the hyacinth,
The lintel mortar and the plinth
Of spring across his bars,
Like globed grapes at first I thought
Then at last more surely wrought
Like winter’s single stars.
Until I glimpsed not him but you
Like an animal the packs pursue
To covert in a forest,
And knew the branches were not spring’s
