by Eavan Boland
Flatten
paps.
Make finny
scaled
and chill
the slack
and dimple
of the rump.
Pout
the mouth,
brow the eyes
and now
and now
eclipse
in these hips,
these loins
the moon,
the blood
flux.
It’s done.
I turn,
I flab upward
blub-lipped,
hipless
and I am
sexless,
shed
of ecstasy,
a pale
swimmer,
sequin-skinned,
pearling eggs
screamlessly
in seaweed.
It’s what
I set my heart on.
Yet
ruddering
and muscling
in the sunless tons
of new freedoms,
still
I feel
a chill pull,
a brightening,
a light, a light,
and how
in my loomy cold,
my greens,
still
she moons
in me.
The Woman Changes Her Skin
How often
in this loneliness,
unlighted
but for the porcelain
brightening
of the bath,
have I done this.
Again and again this.
This is the end:
This crepy
ruche of skin
papering my neck—
elastic when I smile!—
and my eyes
a purse of shadows—
it’s time for something drastic to be done.
This time
in the shadowy
and woody light
between the bath and blind,
between the day and night,
the same blue
eye shadow,
rouge and blusher
will mesh
with my fingers
to a weavy
pulse.
In a ringed
coiling,
a convulsion
I will heave
to a sinuous
and final
shining off
of skin:
Look at the hood
I have made
for my eyes,
my head.
And how, quickly,
over my lips
slicked and cold
my tongue flickers.
Pose
(After the painting Mrs. Badham by Ingres)
She is a housekeeping. A spring cleaning.
A swept, tidied, emptied, kept woman.
Her rimmed hat, its unkempt streamers
neaten to the seams of a collar
frilled and pat as a dressing-table,
its pressed lace and ruching hardly able
to hide the solid column of her neck:
reckless fashion masking common sense!
She smirks uneasily at what she’s shirking—
sitting on this chair in silly clothes,
posing in a truancy of frills.
There’s no repose in her broad knees.
The shawl she shoulders just upholsters her.
She holds the open book like pantry keys.
Patchwork
I have been thinking at random
on the universe
or rather, how nothing in the universe
is random—
(there’s nothing like presumption late at night.)
My sumptuous
trash bag of colors—
Laura Ashley cottons—
waits to be cut
and stitched and patched
but there’s a mechanical feel
about the handle
of my secondhand sewing machine,
with its flowers
and Singer painted orange on it.
And its iron wheel.
My back is to the dark.
Somewhere out there
are stars and bits of stars
and little bits of bits.
And swiftness and brightness and drift.
But is it craft or art?
I will be here
till midnight,
cross-legged in the dining-room,
logging triangles and diamonds,
cutting and aligning,
finding greens in pinks
and burgundies in whites
until I finish it.
There’s no reason in it.
Only when it’s laid
right across the floor,
sphere on square
and seam on seam,
in a good light—
a night-sky spread—
will it start to hit me.
These are not bits.
They are pieces.
And the pieces fit.
Lights
We sailed the long way home
on a coal-burning ship.
There were bracelets on our freighter
of porpoises and water.
When we came where icebergs
mark the stars of The Bear
I leaned over the stern.
I was an urban twelve.
This was the Arctic garden.
A hard, sharkless Eden
porched by the North.
A snow-shrubbed orchard
with Aurora Borealis—
apple-green and icy—
behind an ice wall.
But I was a child of The Fall:
I loved the python waves—
their sinuous, tailing blaze—
coiled in polar water
shoaling towards the cold
occasions where the daughters
of myth sang for sailors,
who lay with them and lie
now in phosphor graves.
I lie half-awake.
The last star is out
and my book is shut.
These August dawns
green the sky at four.
The child asleep beside me
stirs away in dreams.
I am three times twelve.
No more the Aurora,
its apple-icy brightness.
But if I raise the window
and lean I can see
now over the garden,
its ice-cap of shadow,
a nursery light rising,
a midnight sun dawning.
The day will be the same—
its cold illusory rays,
the afternoon’s enclosure
the dusk’s ambiguous gleams:
Doubt still sharks
the close suburban night.
And all the lights I love
leave me in the dark.
Domestic Interior
1. Night Feed
This is dawn.
Believe me
This is your season, little daughter.
The moment daisies open,
The hour mercurial rainwater
Makes a mirror for sparrows.
It’s time we drowned our sorrows.
I tiptoe in.
I lift you up
Wriggling
In your rosy, zipped sleeper.
Yes, this is the hour
For the early bird and me
When finder is keeper.
I crook the bottle.
How you suckle!
This is the best I can be,
Housewife
To this nursery
Where you hold on,
Dear life.
A silt of milk.
The last suck.
And now your eyes are open,
Birth-colored and o
ffended.
Earth wakes.
You go back to sleep.
The feed is ended.
Worms turn.
Stars go in.
Even the moon is losing face.
Poplars stilt for dawn
And we begin
The long fall from grace.
I tuck you in.
2. Monotony
The stilled hub
and polar drab
of the suburb
closes in.
In the round
of the staircase,
my arms sheafing nappies,
I grow in and down
to an old spiral,
a well of questions,
an oracle:
will it tell me—
am I
at these altars,
warm shrines,
washing machines, dryers
with their incense
of men and infants
priestess
or sacrifice?
My late tasks
wait like children:
milk bottles,
the milkman’s note.
Cold air
clouds the rinsed,
milky glass,
blowing clear
with a hint
of winter constellations:
will I find
my answer where
Virgo reaps?
Her arms sheafing
the hemisphere,
hour after frigid hour,
her virgin stars,
her maidenhead
married to force,
harry us
to wed our gleams
to brute routines:
solstices,
small families.
3. Hymn
For a.m.
December.
A lamb
would perish out there.
The cutlery glitter
of that sky
has nothing in it
I want to follow.
Here is the star
of my nativity:
a nursery lamp
in a suburb window
behind which
is boiled glass, a bottle
and a baby all
hisses like a kettle.
The light goes out.
The blackbird takes up his part.
I wake by habit.
I know it all by heart:
these candles
and the altar
and the psaltery of dawn.
And in the dark
as we slept
the world
was made flesh.
4. Partings
By the mercy
of the nursery light,
on the nursery wall,
among bears,
rattles, rag dolls—
in their big shadows—
we are one more and
inseparable again.
Day begins.
The world lives down
the dark union
of its wonders.
Your fingers fist in mine.
Outside the window
winter earth
discovers its horizon
as I cradle mine—
and light finds us
with the other loves
dawn sunders
to define.
5. Energies
This is my time:
The twilight closing in,
a hissing on the ring,
stove noises, kettle steam
and children’s kisses.
But the energy of flowers!
Their faces are so white—
my garden daisies—
they are so tight-fisted,
such economies of light.
In the dusk they have made hay:
in a banked radiance,
in an acreage of brightness
they are misering the day
while mine delays away
in chores left to do:
the soup, the bath, the fire
then bed-time,
up the stairs—
and there, there
the buttery curls,
the light,
the bran-fur of the teddy bear,
the fist like a night-time daisy,
damp and tight.
6. The Muse Mother
My window pearls wet.
The bare rowan tree
berries rain.
I can see
from where I stand
a woman hunkering—
her busy hand
worrying a child’s face,
working a nappy liner
over his sticky, loud
round of a mouth.
Her hand’s a cloud
across his face,
making light and rain,
smiles and a frown,
a smile again.
She jockeys him to her hip,
pockets the nappy liner,
collars rain on her nape
and moves away
but my mind stays fixed:
If I could only decline her—
lost noun
out of context,
stray figure of speech—
from this rainy street
again to her roots,
she might teach me
a new language:
to be a sibyl
able to sing the past
in pure syllables,
limning hymns sung
to belly wheat or a woman—
able to speak at last
my mother tongue.
7. Endings
A child
shifts in a cot.
No matter what happens now
I’ll never fill one again.
It’s a night
white things ember in:
jasmine and the shine—
flowering, opaline—
of the apple trees.
If I lean
I can see
what it is the branches end in:
The leaf.
The reach.
The blossom.
The abandon.
8. In the Garden
Let’s go out now
before the morning
gets warm.
Get your bicycle,
your teddy bear—
the one that’s penny-coloured
like your hair—
and come.
I want to show you
what
I don’t exactly know.
We’ll find out.
It’s our turn
in this garden,
by this light,
among the snails
and daisies—
one so slow
and one so closed—
to learn.
I could show you things:
how the poplar root
is pushing through,
how your apple tree is doing,
how daisies
shut like traps.
But you’re happy
as it is
and innocence
that until this
was just
an abstract water,
welling elsewhere
to refresh,
is risen here
my daughter:
before the dew,
before the bloom,
the snail was here.
The whole morning is his loom
and this is truth,
this is brute grace
as only instinct knows
how to live it:
turn to me
your little face.
It shows a trace still,
an inkling of it.
9. After a Childhood Away from Ireland
One summer
we slipped in at dawn
on plum-coloured water
in the sloppy quiet.
The engines
of the ship stoppe
d.
There was an eerie
drawing near,
a noiseless coming head-on
of red roofs, walls,
dogs, barley stooks.
Then we were there.
Cobh.
Coming home.
I had heard of this:
the ground the emigrants
resistless, weeping,
laid their cheeks to,
put their lips to kiss.
Love is also memory.
I only stared.
What I had lost
was not land
but the habit of land:
whether of growing out of
or settling back on,
or being
defined by.
I climb
to your nursery.
I stand listening
to the dissonances
of the summer’s day ending.
I bend to kiss you.
Your cheeks
are brick pink.
10. Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray
When the painter takes the straight-sided tray
and arranges late melons with grapes and lemons,
the true subject is the space between them,
in which repose the pleasure of these ovals
is seen to be an assembly of possibilities;
a deliberate collection of cross purposes.
Gross blues and purples. Yellow and the shadow of bloom.
The room smells of metal polish. The afternoon sun
brings light but not heat and no distraction from
the study of absences, the science of relationships
on which the abstraction is made actual: such as
fruit on a straight-sided tray; a homely arrangement.
This is the geometry of the visible, physical tryst
between substances, disguising for a while the equation
that kills: you are my child and between us are
spaces. Distances. Growing to infinities.
11. Domestic Interior
The woman is as round
as the new ring
ambering her finger.
The mirror weds her.
She has long since been bedded.
There is
about it all
a quiet search for attention
like the unexpected shine
of a despised utensil.
The oils,
the varnishes,
the cracked light,
the worm of permanence—
all of them supplied by Van Eyck—
by whose edict she will stay
burnished, fertile,
on her wedding day,
interred in her joy.
Love, turn.
The convex of your eye
that is so loving, bright
and constant yet shows
only this woman in her varnishes,
who won’t improve in the light.
But there’s a way of life
that is its own witness:
