In a Time of Violence Read online

  I N A T I M E O F V I O L E N C E

  OTHER BOOKS BY EAVAN BOLAND

  POETRY

  New Territory

  The War Horse

  Night Feed

  The Journey

  Selected Poems: 1989

  Outside History: Selected Poems 1980—1990

  In a Time of Violence

  An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967—1987

  The Lost Land

  PROSE

  Object Lessons:

  The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

  In a Time

  of

  Violence

  EAVAN BOLAND

  W . W . N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y

  N E W Y O R K / L O N D O N

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  THE SINGERS

  I / Writing in a Time of Violence

  1 THAT THE SCIENCE OF CARTOGRAPHY IS LIMITED

  2 THE DEATH OF REASON

  3 MARCH 1 1847.BY THE FIRST POST

  4 IN A BAD LIGHT

  5 THE DOLLS MUSEUM IN DUBLIN

  6 INSCRIPTIONS

  7 WRITING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE

  II / Legends

  THIS MOMENT

  LOVE

  THE POMEGRANATE

  MOTHS

  AT THE GLASS FACTORY IN CAVAN TOWN

  A SPARROW HAWK IN THE SUBURBS

  THE WATER CLOCK

  IN WHICH THE ANCIENT HISTORY I LEARN IS NOT MY OWN

  THE HUGUENOT GRAVEYARD AT THE HEART OF THE CITY

  THE PARCEL

  LAVA CAMEO

  THE SOURCE

  LEGENDS

  III / Anna Liffey

  ANNA LIFFEY

  STORY

  WHAT LANGUAGE DID

  WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS WHO DO THIS

  A WOMAN PAINTED ON A LEAF

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements are made to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems appeared, sometimes in a different form and with different titles.

  The New Yorker “The Pomegranate”; “The Dolls Museum in Dublin”; “A Sparrow Hawk in the Suburbs”; “Love”; “The Water Clock” • The Paris Review “Inscriptions”; “At The Glass Factory in Cavan Town” • American Poetry Review “Anna Liffey” • The Atlantic “The Death of Reason” • The Partisan Review “In a Bad Light” • The Kenyon Review “What Language Did” • The Seneca Review “We Are the Only Animals Who Do This” • The Yale Review “A Woman Painted on a Leaf” • The New Republic “The Parcel” • Poetry “In Which the Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own” • PN Review and Poetry Ireland “At The Glass Factory in Cavan Town” • “Inscriptions” was included in the Pushcart Prize volume of 1992 and was published in The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1991 • “Lava Cameo” was awarded the Daniel Varoujan prize in 1992 by the New England Poetry Club and was published in Soho Square (1991) • “That the Science of Cartography is Limited” appeared in Poetry Review, also in New Poetry (Bloodaxe) 1993 and was awarded the bronze medal in the publication of Poetry Olympians (1992). It also appeared in Poetry Review.

  I would like to thank the Ingram Merrill Foundation whose grant covered the period in which this book was written.

  Several people were helpful in reading these poems. I would like to thank Kevin Casey and Jody Allen-Randolph for their comments. Also, Alice Quinn, Jill Bialosky, and Michael Schmidt.

  I N A T I M E O F V I O L E N C E

  THE SINGERS

  for M.R.

  The women who were singers in the West

  lived on an unforgiving coast.

  I want to ask was there ever one

  moment when all of it relented,

  when rain and ocean and their own

  sense of home were revealed to them

  as one and the same?

  After which

  every day was still shaped by weather,

  but every night their mouths filled with

  Atlantic storms and clouded-over stars

  and exhausted birds.

  And only when the danger

  was plain in the music could you know

  their true measure of rejoicing in

  finding a voice where they found a vision.

  I

  Writing

  in a

  Time of Violence

  A SEQUENCE

  As in a city where the evil are permitted to have

  authority and the good are put out of the way,

  so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the

  imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for

  he indulges the irrational nature which has no

  discernment of greater or less.

  PLATO, The Republic, X

  1 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.

  2 THE DEATH OF REASON

  When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fires down in

  the hayricks and seed-barns of a darkening Ireland,

  the art of portrait-painting reached its height

  across the water.

  The fire caught.

  The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold,

  and the wind carried staves of a ballad:

  The flesh-smell of hatred.

  And she climbed the stairs. Nameless composite.

  Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.

  Rustling gun-coloured silks.

  To set a seal on Augustan London.

  And sat down.

  The easel waits for her

  and the age is ready to resemble her and

  the small breeze cannot touch that powdered hair.

  That elegance.

  But I smell fire.

  From Antrim to the Boyne the sky is reddening as

  the painter tints alizerine crimson with a mite of yellow

  mixed once with white and finds out

  how difficult it is to make the skin

  blush outside the skin.

  The flames have crossed the sea.

  They are at the lintel. At the door.

  At the canvas,

  At her mouth.

  And the curve and pout

  of supple dancing and the couplet rhyming

  and the pomander scenting death-rooms and

  the cabinetmaker setting his veneers

  in honest wood—they are kindling for the flames.

  And the dictates of reason and
the blended sensibility

  of tact and proportion—yes

  the eighteenth century ends here

  as her hem scorches and the satin

  decoration catches fire. She is burning down.

  As a house might. As a candle will.

  She is ash and tallow. It is over.

  3 MARCH I 1847. BY THE FIRST POST

  The daffodils are out & how

  you would love the harebells by

  the Blackwater now.

  But Etty, you are wise to stay away.

  London may be dull in this season.

  Meath is no better I assure you.

  Your copper silk is sewn

  & will be sent and I envy you.

  Noone talks of anything but famine.

  I go nowhere—

  not from door to carriage—but a cloth

  sprinkled with bay rum & rose attar

  is pressed against my mouth.

  Our picnics by the river—

  remember that one with Major Harris?—

  our outings to the opera

  & our teas

  are over now for the time being.

  Shall I tell you what I saw on Friday,

  driving with Mama? A woman lying

  across the Kells Road with her baby—

  in full view. We had to go

  out of our way

  to get home & we were late

  & poor Mama was not herself all day.

  4 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 now 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 I860. 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 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 sewing coffin ships.

  And the salt of exile. And our own

  death in it. For history’s abandonment

  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 of a fern: this is

  the nightmare. See how you 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.

  5 THE DOLLS MUSEUM IN DUBLIN

  The wounds are terrible. The paint is old.

  The cracks along the lips and on the cheeks

  cannot be fixed. The cotton lawn is soiled.

  The arms are ivory dissolved to wax.

  Recall the Quadrille. Hum the waltz.

  Promenade on the yachtclub terraces.

  Put back the lamps in their copper holders.

  The carriage wheels on the cobbled quays.

  And re-create Easter in Dublin.

  Booted officers. Their mistresses.

  Sunlight crisscrossing College Green.

  Steam hissing from the flanks of horses.

  Here they are. Cradled and cleaned.

  Held close in the arms of their owners.

  Their cold hands clasped by warm hands,

  Their faces memorized like perfect manners.

  The altars are mannerly with linen.

  The lilies are whiter than surplices.

  The candles are burning and warning:

  Rejoice, they whisper. After sacrifice.

  Horse chestnuts hold up their candles.

  The Green is vivid with parasols.

  Sunlight is pastel and windless.

  The bar of the Shelbourne is full.

  Laughter and gossip on the terraces.

  Rumour and alarm at the barracks.

  The Empire is summoning its officers.

  The carriages are turning: they are turning back.

  Past children walking with governesses,

  Looking down, cossetting their dolls,

  then looking up as the carriage passes,

  the shadow chilling them. Twilight falls.

  It is twilight in the dolls’ museum. Shadows

  remain on the parchment-coloured waists,

  are bruises on the stitched cotton clothes,

  are hidden in the dimples on the wrists.

  The eyes are wide. They cannot address

  the helplessness which has lingered in

  the airless peace of each glass case:

  To have survived. To have been stronger than

  a moment. To be the hostages ignorance

  takes from time and ornament from destiny. Both.

  To be the present of the past. To infer the difference

  with a terrible stare. But not feel it. And not know it.

  6 INSCRIPTIONS

  About holiday rooms there can be

  a solid feel at first. Then, as you go upstairs,

  the air gets

  a dry rustle of excitement

  the way a new dress comes out of tissue paper,

  up and out of it, and

  the girl watching this thinks:

  Where will I wear it? Who will kiss me in it?

  Peter

  was the name on the cot.

  The cot was made of the carefully bought

  scarcities of the nineteen-forties:

  Oak. Tersely planed and varnished.

  Cast-steel hinges.

  I stood where the roof sloped into

  paper roses,

  in a room where a child once went to sleep,

  looking at blue, painted lettering:

  as he slept

  someone had found for him

  five pieces of the alphabet which said

  the mauve petals of his eyelids as they closed out

  the scalded hallway moonlight made of the ocean at

  the end of his road.

  Someone knew

  the importance of giving him a name.

  For years I have known

  how important it is

  not to name

  the coffins, the murdered in them,

  the deaths in alleyways and on doorsteps—

  in case they rise out of their names

  and I recognize

  the child who slept peacefully

  and the girl who guessed at her future in

  the dress as it came out of its box,

  falling free in

  kick pleats of silk.

  And what comfort can there be

  in knowing that

  in a distant room

  his sign is safe tonight

  and reposes its modest blues in darkness?

  Or that outside his window

  the name-eating elements—the salt wind, the rain—

  must find

  headstones to feed their hunger?

  7 WRITING IN A TIME OF VIOLENCE

  I
n 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 Saint had sent them out of Ireland—

  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 whispers

  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.

  II

  Legends

  THIS MOMENT

  A neighbourhood.

  At dusk.

  Things are getting ready

  to happen

  out of sight.

  Stars and moths.

  And rinds slanting around fruit.

  But not yet.

  One tree is black.

  One window is yellow as butter.

  A woman leans down to catch a child

  who has run into her arms

  this moment.

  Stars rise.

  Moths flutter.

  Apples sweeten in the dark.

  LOVE