by Eavan Boland
Dark falls on this mid-western town
where we once lived when myths collided.
Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river
which slides and deepens
to become the water
the hero crossed on his way to hell.
Not far from here is our old apartment.
We had a kitchen and an Amish table.
We had a view. And we discovered there
love had the feather and muscle of wings
and had come to live with us,
a brother of fire and air.
We had two infant children one of whom
was touched by death in this town
and spared: and when the hero
was hailed by his comrades in hell
their mouths opened and their voices failed and
there is no knowing what they would have asked
about a life they had shared and lost.
I am your wife.
It was years ago.
Our child is healed. We love each other still.
Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances
we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.
And yet I want to return to you
on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were,
with snow on the shoulders of your coat
and a car passing with its headlights on:
I see you as a hero in a text—
the image blazing and the edges gilded—
and I long to cry out the epic question
my dear companion:
Will we ever live so intensely again?
Will love come to us again and be
so formidable at rest it offered us ascension
even to look at him?
But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.
You walk away and I cannot follow.
THE POMEGRANATE
The only legend I have ever loved is
The story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
A city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
An exiled child in the crackling dusk of
The underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
Searching for my daughter at bedtime.
When she came running I was ready
To make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams.
And wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
Winter was in store for every leaf
On every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
And the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
My child asleep beside her teen magazines,
Her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
And ended the story and all
Our heartbroken searching but she reached
Out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
The French sound for apple and
The noise of stone and the proof
That even in the place of death,
At the heart of legend, in the midst
Of rocks full of unshed tears
Ready to be diamonds by the time
The story was told, a child can be
Hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
Can a mother give her daughter but such
Beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend must be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
The papery, flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.
MOTHS
Tonight the air smells of cut grass.
Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is
a place mislaid between expectation and memory.
This has been a summer of moths.
Their moment of truth comes well after dark.
Then they reveal themselves at our window—
ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.
The books I look up about them are full of legends:
Ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.
Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.
The moon is up. The back windows are wide open.
Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.
Once again they are near the windowsill—
fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,
which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them
they will fall down without knowing how
or why what they steered by became, suddenly,
what they crackled and burned around. They will perish—
I am perishing—on the edge and at the threshold of
the moment all nature fears and tends toward:
The stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.
And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes
my child’s shadow longer than my own.
AT THE GLASS FACTORY IN CAVAN TOWN
Today it is a swan:
The guide tells us
these are in demand.
The glass is made
of red lead and potash
and the smashed bits
of crystal sinews
and decanter stoppers
crated over there—
she points—and shattered
on the stone wheel
rimmed with emery.
Aromas of stone and
fire. Deranged singing
from the grindstone.
And behind that
a mirror—my
daughters’ heads turned
away in it—garnering
grindstone and fire.
The glass blower goes
to the furnace.
He takes a pole
from the earth’s
core: the earth’s core
is remembered in
the molten globe at
the end of it.
He shakes the pole
carefully to and fro.
He blows once. Twice.
His cheeks puff and
puff up: he is
a cherub at the very
edge of a cornice with
a mouthful of zephyrs—
sweet intrusions into
leaves and lace hems.
And now he lays
the rod on its spindle.
It is red. It is
ruddy and cooler.
It is cool now
and as clear as
the distances of this
county with its drumlins,
its herons, its closed-
in waterways on which
we saw this morning
as we drove over
here, a mated pair
of swans. Such
blind grace as they
floated with told us
they did not know
that every hour,
every day, and
not far away from
there, they were
entering the
legend of
themselves. They gave no
sign of it. But what
caught my eye, my
attention, was the safety
they assumed as
they sailed their own
images. Here, now—
and knowing that
the mirror still holds
my actual flesh—
I could say to them:
reflection is the first
myth of loss. But
they floated away and
away from me as if
no one would ever blow
false airs on them,
or try their sinews
in the fire, at
the core, and they
took no care
not to splinter, they
showed no fear
they would end as
this one which is
uncut yet still might:
a substance of its own
future form, both
fraction and refraction
in the deal-wood
crate at the door
we will leave by.
A SPARROW HAWK IN THE SUBURBS
At that time of year there is a turn in the road where
the hermit tones and meadow colours of
two seasons heal into
one another—
when the wild ladder of a winter scarf is stored away in
a drawer eased by candle-grease and lemon balm
is shaken out from
the linen press.
Those are afternoons when the Dublin hills are so close,
so mauve and blue, we can be certain dark
will bring rain and
it does to
the borrowed shears and the love-seat in the garden where
a sparrow hawk was seen through the opal-
white of apple trees
after Easter. And
I want to know how it happened that those days of bloom when
rumours of wings and sightings—always seen by
someone else, somewhere else—
filled the air,
together with a citrus drizzle of petals and clematis opening,
and shadows waiting on a gradual lengthening
in the light our children
stayed up
later by, over pages of wolves and dragons and learned to
measure the sanctuary of darkness by a small
danger—how and why
they have chilled
into these April nights I lie awake listening for wings I will
never see above the cold frames and
last frosts of our
back gardens.
THE WATER CLOCK
Thinking of ageing on a summer day
of rain and more rain
I took a book down from a shelf
and stopped to read
and found myself—
how did it happen?—
reflecting on
the absurd creation of the water clock.
Drops collected
on the bell-tongues of fuchsia
outside my window.
Apple-trees
dripped. I read about
the clepsydra: invention of an ancient world,
which reconciled
element to argument
before the alphabet
had crossed the Hellespont:
Water dripped
from above
and turned a wheel
which was about to turn
a dial when I looked up and saw
the rain had stopped.
How could they have? I thought.
Taken an element, that is.
Which swallowed faces, stars, irises, Narcissus.
And posed as frost, ice, snow.
And had a feel for
the theatre
and catastrophe of floods. And,
in an August storm,
could bring the moon to heel.
And reduced it
to this? And the sun came out and
the afternoon cleared.
And in half-an-hour—
maybe even less—
every trace of rain had disappeared.
IN WHICH THE ANCIENT HISTORY I LEARN IS NOT MY OWN
The linen map
hung from the wall.
The linen was shiny
and cracked in places.
The cracks were darkened by grime.
It was fastened to the classroom wall with
a wooden batten on
a triangle of knotted cotton.
The colours
were faded out
so the red of Empire—
the stain of absolute possession—
the mark once made from Kashmir
to the oast-barns of the Kent
coast south of us was
underwater coral.
Ireland was far away
and farther away
every year.
I was nearly an English child.
I could list the English kings.
I could name the famous battles.
I was learning to recognize
God’s grace in history.
And the waters
of the Irish sea,
their shallow weave
and cross-grained blue green
had drained away
to the pale gaze
of a doll’s china eyes—
a stare without recognition or memory.
We have no oracles,
no rocks or olive trees,
no sacred path to the temple
and no priestesses.
The teacher’s voice had a London accent.
This was London. 1952.
It was Ancient History Class.
She put the tip
of the wooden
pointer on the map.
She tapped over ridges and dried-
out rivers and cities buried in
the sea and seascapes which
had once been land.
And stopped.
Remember this, children.
The Roman Empire was
the greatest Empire
ever known—
until our time of course—
while the Delphic Oracle
was reckoned to be
the exact centre
of the earth.
Suddenly
I wanted
to stand in front of it.
I wanted to trace over
and over the weave of my own country.
To read out names
I was close to forgetting.
Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.
To ask
where exactly
was my old house?
Its brass One and Seven.
Its flight of granite steps.
Its lilac tree whose scent
stayed under your fingernails
for days.
For days—
she was saying—even months,
the ancients traveled
to the Oracle.
They brought sheep and killed them.
They brought questions about tillage and war.
They rarely left with more
than an ambiguous answer.
THE HUGUENOT GRAVEYARD AT THE HEART OF THE CITY
It is the immodesty we bring to these
names which have eased into ours, and
their graves in the alcove of twilight,
which shadows their exile:
There is a flattery in being a destination.
There is a vanity in being the last resort.
They fled the Edict of Nantes—
hiding their shadows on the roads from France—
and now under brambles and granite
faith lies low with the lives it
dispossessed, and the hands it emptied out,
and the sombre dances they were joined in.
>
The buses turn right at Stephen’s Green.
Car exhaust and sirens fill the air. See
the planted wildness of their rest and
grant to them the least loves asks of
the living. Say: they had another life once.
And think of them as they first heard of us—
huddled around candles and words failing as
the stubbon tongue of the South put
oo and an to the sounds of Dublin,
and of their silver fingers at the windowsill
in the full moon as they leaned out
to breathe the sweet air of Nimes
for the last time, and the flame
burned down in a dawn agreed upon
for their heart-broken leave-taking. And
for their sakes, accept in that moment,
this city with its colours of sky and day—
and which is dear to us and particular—
was not a place to them: merely
the one witty step ahead of hate which
is all that they could keep. Or stay.
THE PARCEL
There are dying arts and
one of them is
the way my mother used to make up a parcel.
Paper first. Mid-brown and coarse-grained as wood.
The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly
or laying flat at Christmas on a pudding bowl.
It was a big cylinder. She snipped it open
and it unrolled quickly across the floor.
All business, all distance.
Then the scissors.
Not a glittering let-up but a dour
pair, black thumb-holes,
the shears themselves the colour of the rained-
on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up
in the season of lilac and snapdragon
and stood there arguing the rate for
sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair
and this one. All-in.
The ball of twine was coarsely braided
and only a shade less yellow than
the flame she held under the blunt
end of the sealing wax until
it melted and spread into a brittle
terracotta medal.
Her hair dishevelled, her tongue between her teeth,
she wrote the address in the quarters
twine had divided the surface into.
Names and places. Crayon and fountain pen.
The town underlined once. The country twice.
It’s ready for the post
she would say and if we want to know
where it went to—
a craft lost before we missed it—watch it go
into the burlap sack for collection.
See it disappear. Say
this is how it died
out: among doomed steamships and outdated trains,
the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes,
next to station names we can’t remember
on a continent we no longer
