Eavan Boland

I have a word for it — the way the surface waited all day to be a silvery pause between sky and city — which is elver. And another one for how the bay shelved cirrus clouds piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea, which is elver too. The old Blackrock baths have been neglected now for fifty years, fine cracks in the tiles visible as they never were when I can I can I can shouted Harry Vernon as he dived from the highest board curving down into salt and urine his cry fading out through the half century it took to hear as a child that a glass eel had been seen entering the seawater baths at twilight — also known as elver— and immediately the word begins a delicate migration — a fine crazing healing in the tiles — the sky deepening above a city that has always been unsettled between sluice gates and the Irish Sea to which there now comes at dusk a translucent visitor yearning for the estuary.

It happens again As soon as I take down her book and open it. I turn the page. My skies rise higher and hang younger stars. The ship's rail freezes. Mare Hibernicum leads to Anne Bradstreet's coast. A blackbird leaves her pine trees And lands in my spruce trees. I open my door on a Dublin street. Her child/her words are staring up at me: In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. We say home truths Because her words can be at home anywhere— At the source, at the end and whenever The book lies open and I am again An Irish poet watching an English woman Become an American poet.

My mother died one summer— the wettest in the records of the state. Crops rotted in the west. Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. Empty deck chairs collected rain. As I took my way to her through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly behind houses and on curbsides, to pay her the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something I remembered I heard once, that the body is, or is said to be, almost all water and as I turned southward, that ours is a city of it, one in which every single day the elements begin a journey towards each other that will never, given our weather, fail— the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, cloud color reaching into air, the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, as if that wasn't enough, all of it ending up almost every evening inside our speech— coast canal ocean river stream and now mother and I drove on and although the mind is unreliable in grief, at the next cloudburst it almost seemed they could be shades of each other, the way the body is of every one of them and now they were on the move again—fog into mist, mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze that lay on the railings of the house she was dying in as I went inside.