Eavan Boland

As dawn breaks he enters A room with the odor of acid. He lays the copper plate on the table. And reaches for the shaft of the burin. Dublin wakes to horses and rain. Street hawkers call. All the news is famine and famine. The flat graver, the round graver, The angle tint tool wait for him. He bends to his work and begins. He starts with the head, cutting in To the line of the cheek, finding The slope of the skull, incising The shape of a face that becomes A foundry of shadows, rendering — With a deeper cut into copper — The whole woman as a skeleton, The rags of  her skirt, her wrist In a bony line forever severing Her body from its native air until She is ready for the page, For the street vendor, for A new inventory which now To loss and to laissez-faire adds The odor of acid and the little, Pitiless tragedy of  being imagined. He puts his tools away, One by one; lays them out carefully On the deal table, his work done.

This dry night, nothing unusual About the clip, clop, casual Iron of his shoes as he stamps death Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth. I lift the window, watch the ambling feather Of hock and fetlock, loosed from its daily tether In the tinker camp on the Enniskerry Road, Pass, his breath hissing, his snuffling head Down. He is gone. No great harm is done. Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn— Of distant interest like a maimed limb, Only a rose which now will never climb The stone of our house, expendable, a mere Line of defence against him, a volunteer You might say, only a crocus, its bulbous head Blown from growth, one of the screamless dead. But we, we are safe, our unformed fear Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated? He stumbles on like a rumour of war, huge Threatening. Neighbours use the subterfuge Of curtains. He stumbles down our short street Thankfully passing us. I pause, wait, Then to breathe relief lean on the sill And for a second only my blood is still With atavism. That rose he smashed frays Ribboned across our hedge, recalling days Of burned countryside, illicit braid: A cause ruined before, a world betrayed.

After a while I thought of it this way: It was a town underneath a mountain crowned by snow and every year a river rushed through, enveloping the dusk in a noise everyone knew signaled spring— a small town, known for a kind of calico, made there, strong and unglazed, a makeshift of cotton in which the actual unseparated husks still remained and could be found if you looked behind the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird with swept-back wings always trying to arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it might have occupied if anyone had offered it. And if you ask me now what happened to it— the town that is—the answer is of course there was no town, it never actually existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton on which a bird never landed is not gone, because it never was, never once, but then how to explain that sometimes I can hear the river in those first days of April, making its way through the dusk, having learned to speak the way I once spoke, saying as if I didn't love you, as if I wouldn't have died for you.

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.

I have two daughters. They are all I ever wanted from the earth. Or almost all. I also wanted one piece of ground: One city trapped by hills. One urban river. An island in its element. So I could say mine. My own. And mean it. Now they are grown up and far away and memory itself has become an emigrant, wandering in a place where love dissembles itself as landscape: Where the hills are the colours of a child's eyes, where my children are distances, horizons: At night, on the edge of sleep, I can see the shore of Dublin Bay. Its rocky sweep and its granite pier. Is this, I say how they must have seen it, backing out on the mailboat at twilight, shadows falling on everything they had to leave? And would love forever? And then I imagine myself at the landward rail of that boat searching for the last sight of a hand. I see myself on the underworld side of that water, the darkness coming in fast, saying all the names I know for a lost land: Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

My mother was married by the water. She wore a gray coat and a winter rose. She said her vows beside a cold seam of the Irish coast. She said her vows near the shore where the emigrants set down their consonantal n: on after n oo n, on the e n d of everything, at the start of ever. Yellow vestments took in light. A chalice hid underneath its veil. Her hands were full of calla and cold-weather lilies. The mail packet dropped anchor. A black-headed gull swerved across the harbor. Icy promises rose beside a crosshatch of ocean and horizon. I am waiting for the words of the service. I am waiting for keep thee only and all my earthly. All I hear is an afternoon’s worth of never.

for Elizabeth Ryle Immediately cries were heard. These were the loud wailing of infant souls weeping at the very entrance-way; never had they had their share of life’s sweetness for the dark day had stolen them from their mothers’ breasts and plunged them to a death before their time. —Virgil, The Aeneid , Book VI And then the dark fell and ‘there has never’ I said ‘been a poem to an antibiotic: never a word to compare with the odes on the flower of the raw sloe for fever ‘or the devious Africa-seeking tern or the protein treasures of the sea-bed. Depend on it, somewhere a poet is wasting his sweet uncluttered metres on the obvious ‘emblem instead of the real thing. Instead of sulpha we shall have hyssop dipped in the wild blood of the unblemished lamb, so every day the language gets less ‘for the task and we are less with the language.’ I finished speaking and the anger faded and dark fell and the book beside me lay open at the page Aphrodite comforts Sappho in her love’s duress. The poplars shifted their music in the garden, a child startled in a dream, my room was a mess— the usual hardcovers, half-finished cups, clothes piled up on an old chair— and I was listening out but in my head was a loosening and sweetening heaviness, not sleep, but nearly sleep, not dreaming really but as ready to believe and still unfevered, calm and unsurprised when she came and stood beside me and I would have known her anywhere and I would have gone with her anywhere and she came wordlessly and without a word I went with her down down down without so much as ever touching down but always, always with a sense of mulch beneath us, the way of stairs winding down to a river and as we went on the light went on failing and I looked sideways to be certain it was she, misshapen, musical— Sappho—the scholiast’s nightingale and down we went, again down until we came to a sudden rest beside a river in what seemed to be an oppressive suburb of the dawn. My eyes got slowly used to the bad light. At first I saw shadows, only shadows. Then I could make out women and children and, in the way they were, the grace of love. ‘Cholera, typhus, croup, diptheria’ she said, ‘in those days they racketed in every backstreet and alley of old Europe. Behold the children of the plague.’ Then to my horror I could see to each nipple some had clipped a limpet shape— suckling darknesses—while others had their arms weighed down, making terrible pietàs. She took my sleeve and said to me, ‘be careful. Do not define these women by their work: not as washerwomen trussed in dust and sweating, muscling water into linen by the river’s edge ‘nor as court ladies brailled in silk on wool and woven with an ivory unicorn and hung, nor as laundresses tossing cotton, brisking daylight with lavender and gossip. ‘But these are women who went out like you when dusk became a dark sweet with leaves, recovering the day, stooping, picking up teddy bears and rag dolls and tricycles and buckets— ‘love’s archaeology—and they too like you stood boot deep in flowers once in summer or saw winter come in with a single magpie in a caul of haws, a solo harlequin.’ I stood fixed. I could not reach or speak to them. Between us was the melancholy river, the dream water, the narcotic crossing and they had passed over it, its cold persuasions. I whispered, ‘let me be let me at least be their witness,’ but she said ‘what you have seen is beyond speech, beyond song, only not beyond love; ‘remember it, you will remember it’ and I heard her say but she was fading fast as we emerged under the stars of heaven, ‘there are not many of us; you are dear ‘and stand beside me as my own daughter. I have brought you here so you will know forever the silences in which are our beginnings, in which we have an origin like water,’ and the wind shifted and the window clasp opened, banged and I woke up to find the poetry books stacked higgledy piggledy, my skirt spread out where I had laid it— nothing was changed; nothing was more clear but it was wet and the year was late. The rain was grief in arrears; my children slept the last dark out safely and I wept.

A famous battle happened in this valley. You never understood the nature poem. Till now. Till this moment—if these statements seem separate, unrelated, follow this silence to its edge and you will hear the history of air: the crispness of a fern or the upward cut and turn around of a fieldfare or thrush written on it. The other history is silent: The estuary is over there. The issue was decided here: Two kings prepared to give no quarter. Then one king and one dead tradition. Now the humid dusk, the old wounds wait for language, for a different truth: When you see the silk of the willow and the wider edge of the river turn and grow dark and then darker, then you will know that the nature poem is not the action nor its end: it is this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet, on the steering wheel shaft: it is an aftermath, an overlay and even in its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen And as I write valley straw, metal blood, oaths, armour are unwritten. Silence spreads slowly from these words to those ilex trees half in, half out of shadows falling on the shallow ford of the south bank beside Yellow Island as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion begins to be complete: what we see is what the poem says: evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and whin bushes and a change of weather about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are for this moment free of one another.

One afternoon of summer rain my hand skimmed a shelf and I found an old florin. Ireland, 1950. We say like or as and the world is a fish minted in silver and alloy, an outing for all the children, an evening in the Sandford cinema, a paper cone of lemonade crystals and say it again so we can see androgyny of angels, edges to a circle, the way the body works against the possible— and no one to tell us, now or ever, why it ends, why it always ends. I am holding two whole shillings of nothing, observing its heaviness, its uselessness. And how in the cool shadow of nowhere a salmon leaps up to find a weir it could not even know was never there.

1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. And there was a couple who quarreled into the night, Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely right in the lives of those who love each other. 2. In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too. We stood there wondering how the salt horizons and the Dublin hills, the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes we thought we knew had been made to shiver into our ancient twelve by fifteen television which gave them back as gray and grayer tears and killings, killings, killings, then moonlight-colored funerals: nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other. 3. And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done? 4. We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one. Children were born and raised here and are gone, including ours. As for that couple did we ever find out who they were and did we want to? I think we know. I think we always knew.