posts tagged "Eavan Boland"

"Is it only love
that makes a place?”
-Eavan Boland, from “Anna Liffey"

We are Always Too Late by Eavan Boland

Memory
Is in two parts.

First the re-visiting:

the way even now I can see
those lovers at the café table. She is weeping.

It is New England, breakfast time, winter. Behind her,
outside the picture window, is
a stand of white pines.

New snow falls and the old,
losing its balance in the branches,
showers down,
adding fractions to it. Then

The re-enactment. Always that.
I am getting up, pushing away
coffee. Always I am going towards her.

The flush and scald is
to her forehead now, and back down to her neck.

I raise one hand. I am pointing to
those trees, I am showing her our need for these
beautiful upstagings of
what we suffer by
what survives. And she never even sees me.

Solitary by Eavan Boland

Night:
An oratory of dark,
a chapel of unreason.

Here in the shrubbery
the shrine.
I am its votary,
its season.

Flames
single
to my fingers

expert
to pick out
their heart,
the sacred heat

none may violate.
You could die for this.
The gods could make you blind.

I defy them.
I know,
only I know

these incendiary
and frenzied ways:
I am alone

no one’s here,
no one sees
my hands

fan and cup,
my thumbs tinder.
How it leaps

from spark to blaze!
I flush.
I darken.

How my flesh summers,
how my mind shadows
meshed in this brightness,

how my cry
blasphemes
light and dark,
screams
land from sea,
makes word flesh
that now makes me

animal
inanimate,
satiate,

and back I go
to a slack tip,
a light.

I stint my worship,
the cold watch I keep.
Fires flint somewhere else.
I winter
into sleep.

Menses by Eavan Boland

It is dark again.

I am sick of it
filled with it,
dulled by it,
thick with it.

To be the mere pollution of her wake!
a water cauled by her light,
a slick haul,
a fallen self,
a violence,
a daughter.

I am the moon’s looking glass.
My days are moon-dials.
She will never be done with me.
She needs me.
She is dry.

I leash to her,
a sea,
a washy heave,
a tide.
Only my mind is free

among the ruffian growths,
the bindweed
and the meadowsweet,
the riff-raff of my garden.

How I envy them;
each filament,
each anther bred
from its own style,
its stamen,
is to itself a christening,
is to itself a marriage bed.

They fall to earth,
so ignorant
so innocent
of the sweated waters
and the watered salts,
of ecstasy,
of birth.

They are street-walkers,
lesbians,
nuns.
I am not one of them

and how they’d pity me

now as dusk encroaches
and she comes
looking for her looking-glass.
And it is me.

Yes it is me
she poaches her old face in.
I am bloated with her waters.
I am barren with her blood.
Another hour
and she will addle me

till I begin
to think like her.
As when I’ve grown
round and obscene with child,
or when I moan,
for him between the sheets,
then I begin to know
that I am bright and original
and that my light’s my own.