THAT THE SCIENCE OF CARTOGRAPHY IS LIMITED

-and not simply by the fact that this shading of

forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove

to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass

rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,

Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, nor

an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger

and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

Eavan Boland
THE BLACK LACE FAN MY MOTHER GAVE ME

It was the first gift he ever gave her,

buying it for five five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.

They stayed in the city for the summer.

They met in cafes. She was always early.
He was late. That evening he was later.
They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.

She ordered more coffee. She stood up.
The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.
She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,

darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.
The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent clear patience
of its element. It is
a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,
even now, an inference of its violation.
The lace is overcast as if the weather
it opened for and offset had entered it.

The past is an empty cafe terrace.

An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.
And no way to know what happened then—
none at all—unless, of course, you improvise:

The blackbird on this first sultry morning,

in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,
feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing—
the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.
AN IRISH CHILDHOOD IN ENGLAND: 1951

From The Journey (1987)

The bickering of vowels on the buses,

The clicking thumbs ant the big hips of
The navy-skirted ticket collectors with
Their crooked seams brought it home to me:
Exile. Ration-book pudding.
Bowls of dripping and the fixed smile
Of the school pianist playing “Iolanthe,”
“Land of Hope and Glory”
And “John Peel.”

I didn’t know what to hold, to keep.

At night, filled with some malaise
Of love for what I’d never known I had,
I fell asleep and let the moment pass.
The passing moment has become a night
of clipped shadows, freshly painted houses,
the garden eddying in dark and heat,
my children half-awake, half-asleep.

Airless, humid dark. Leaf-noise.

The stirrings of a garden before rain.
A hint of storm behind the risen moon.
We are what we have chosen. Did I choose to? –
In a strange city, in another country,
On nights in a North-facing bedroom,
Waiting for the sleep that never did
Restore me as I’d hoped to what I’d lost –

Let the world I knew become the space

Between the words that I had by heart
And all the other speech that always was
Becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen-fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
Overdressed and sick on the plane
When all of England to an Irish child

Was nothing more than what you’d lost an how:

Was the teacher in the London convent who
When I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
Turned and said –you’re not in Ireland now.”
MAKING UP

My naked face; I look

I wake to it. In the glass.
How it’s dulsed and shrouded! My face is made,
it’s a cloud, It says:

a dull pre-dawn. Take nothing, nothing

But I’ll soon At its face value:
See to that. Legendary seas,
I push the blusher up, Nakedness,

I raddle That up and stuck

And I prink, Lassitude
Pinking bone Of thigh and buttock
Till my eyes That they prayed to –

Are It’s a trick.

A rouge-washed Myths
Flush of water. Are made by men
Now the base The truth of this

Pales and wastes. Wave-raiding

Light thins Sea-heaving
From ear to chin, Made-up
Whitening in Tale

The ocean shine Of a face

Mirror set From the source
Of my eyes Of the morning
That I fledge Is my own:

In old darks. Mine are the rouge pots

I grease and full The hot pinks,
My mouth. The fledged
I won’t stay shut: And edgy mix
Of light and water
Out of which
I dawn.
THE FAMINE ROAD

“Idle as trout in light Colonel Jones

These Irish, give them no coins at all; their bones
Need toil, their characters no less.” Trevelyan’s
Seal blooded the deal table. The Relief
Committee deliberated: “Might it be safe,
Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force
From nowhere, going nowhere of course?”

One out of every ten and then

Another third of those again
Women –in a case like yours.

Sick, directionless they worked. Fork, stick

Were iron years away; after all could
They not blood their knuckles on rock, suck
April hailstones for water and for food?
Why for that, cunning as housewives, each eyed –
As if at a corner butcher –the other’s buttock.

Anything may have caused it, spores,

A childhood accident; one sees
Day after day these mysteries.

Dusk: they will work tomorrow without him.

They know it and walk clear. He has become
A typhoid pariah, his blood tainted, although
He shares it with some there. No more than snow
Attends its own flakes where they settle
And melt, will they pray by his death rattle.

You never will, never you know

But take it well woman, grow
Your garden, keep house, good-bye.

“It has gone better than we expected, Lord

Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured
In one. From parish to parish, field to field;
The wretches work till they are quite worn,
Then fester by their work. We march the corn
To the ships in peace. This Tuesday I saw bones
Out of my carriage window. Your servant Jones.”

Barren, never to know the load

Of his child in you, what is your body
Now if not a famine road?
THE SHADOW DOLL

(This was sent to the bride-to-be in Victorian times,

by her dress maker. It consisted of a porcelain doll,
under a dome of glass, modeling the proposed
wedding dress.)
they stitched blooms for the ivory tulle
to them the oyster gleam of the veil.
They made hoops for the crinoline.

Now, in summary and neatly sewn –

A porcelain bride in an airless glamour –
The shadow doll survives its occasion.

Under glass, under wraps, it stays

Even now, after all, discreet about
Visits, fevers, quickening and lusts

And just how, when she looked at

the shell-tone spray of seed pearls,
The bisque features, she could see herself

Inside it all, holding less than real

Stephanotis, rose petals, never feeling
Satin rise and fall with the vows

I kept repeating on the night before –

Astray among the cards and wedding gifts –
The coffee pots and the clocks and

The battered tan case full of cotton

Lace and tissue paper, pressing down, then
Pressing down again. And then, locks.
IN A BAD LIGHT

This is St. Louis. Where the rivers meet.

The Illinois. The Mississippi. The Missouri.
The light is in its element of Autumn.
Clear. With yellow Gingko leaves falling.
There is always a nightmare. Even in such light.

The weather must be cold in Dublin.

And when skies are clear, frosts come
Down on the mountains and the first
Inklings of winter will be underfoot in
The crisp iron of a fern at dawn.

I stand in a room in the Museum.

In one glass case a plastic figure
Represents a woman in a dress,
With crepe sleeves and a satin apron.
And feet laced neatly into suede.

She stands in a replica of a cabin

On a steamboat bound for New Orleans.
The year is 1860. Nearly war.
A notice says no comforts were spared. The silk
Is French. The seamstresses are Irish.

I see them in the oil-lit parlours.

I am in the gas-lit backrooms.
We make in the apron front and front and from
The papery appearance and crushable
look of crepe, a sign. We are bent over.

In a bad light. We are sewing a last

sight of shore. We are seing coffin ships.
And the salt of exile. And our own
death in it. For history’s abandonement,
we are doing this. And this. And

this is a button hole. This is a stitch.

Fury enters them as frost follows
Every arabesque and curl o f a fern: this is
The nightmare. See how your perceive it.
We sleep the sleep of exhaustion.

We dream a woman on a steamboat

Parading in sunshine in a dress we know
We made. She laughs off rumours of war.
She turns and traps light on the skirt.
It is, for that moment, beautiful.
WRITING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE
In my last year in College
I set out
To write an essay on
The Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find

The country already lost to me

In song and figure as I scribbled down
Names for sweet euphony and safe digression.

And when I came to the word insinuate

I saw that language could writhe and creep
And the lore of snakes
Which I had learned as a child not to fear –
Because the sain had sent then out of Irleand –
Came nearer.

Chiasmus. Litotes. Periphrasis. Old

Indices and agents of persuasion. How
I remember them in that room where
A girl is writing at a desk with
Dusk already in
The streets outside. I can see her. I could say to her –

We will live, we have lived

Where language is concealed. Is perilous.
We will be –we have been – citizens
Of its hiding place. But it is too late.

To shut the book of satin phrases,

To refuse to enter
An evening bitter with peat smoke,
Where newspaper sellers shout headlines
And friends call out their farewells in
A city of whisper
And interiors where

The dear vowels

Irish Ireland ours are
Absorbed into Autumn air,
Are out of earshot in the distances
We are stepping into where we never

Imagine words such as hate

And territory and the like –unbanished still
As they always would be –wait
And are waiting under
Beautiful speech. To strike.
A WOMAN PAINTED ON A LEAF
I found it among curious and silver.
In the pureness of wintry light.

A woman painted on a leaf.

Fine lines drawn on a veined surface

In a handmade frame.

This is not my face. Neither did I draw it.

A leaf falls in a garden.

The moon cools its aftermath of sap
The pith of summer dries out in starlight.

A woman inscribed there.

This is not death. It is the terrible

Suspension of life.

I want a poem.
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.

I want to take
this dried-out face,
as you take a starling from behind iron,
and return it to its element of air, of ending –

so that autumn
which was once
the hard look of stars,
the frown on a gardener’s face,
a gradual bronzing of the distance,

will be,
from now on,
a crisp tinder underfoot. Cheekbones. Eyes. Will be
a mouth crying out . Let me.

Let me die.
THE WOMEN

This is the hour of love: the in-between,

Neither here-nor-there hour of evening.
The air is tea-colored in the garden.
The briar rose is spilled crepe-de-Chine.

This is the time I do my work best,

Going up the stairs in two minds,
In two worlds, carrying cloth or glass,
Leaving something behind, bringing
Something with me I should have left behind.

The hour of change, of metamorphosis,

Of shape-shifting instabilities.
My time of sixth sense and second sight
When in the words I choose, the Iines write,
They rise like visions and appear to me:

Women of work, of leisure, of the night,

In stove-colored silks, in lace, in nothing,
With crewed needles, with books, with wide open legs

Who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing

Who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips
And fell and grieved and healed into myth,

Into me in the evening at my desk

Testing the water with a sweet quartet,
The physical force of dissonance –

The fission of music into syllabic heat –

And getting sick of it and standing up
And going downstairs in the last brightness

Into landscape without emphasis,

Light, linear, precisely planned,
A hemisphere of tiered, aired cotton,

A hot terrain of linen form the iron

Folded in and over, stacked high,
Neatened flat, stoving heat and white.
MISE EIRE
I won’t go back to it –

My nation displaced
Into old dactyls,
Oaths made
By the animal tallows
Of the candle –

Land of the Gulf Stream,

The small farm,
The scalded memory,
The songs
That bandage up the history,
The words
That make a rhythm of the crime

Where time is time past.

A palsy of regrets.
No. I won’t go back.
My roots are brutal:

I am the woman –
A sloven’s mix
Of silk at the wrists
A sort of dove-strut
In the precincts of the garrison –

Who practices
The quick frictions,
The rictus of delight
And gets cambric for it,
Rice-coloured silks.

I am the woman
In the gansy-coat
On board the ‘Mary Belle’,
In the huddling cold,

Holding her half-dead baby to

Her
As the wind shifts East
And North over the dirty
Waters of the wharf

Mingling the immigrant

Guttural with the vowels
Of homesickness who neither
Knows nor cares that

A new language
Is a kind of scar
and heals after a while
Into a passable imitation
Of what went before.