In a Time of Violence Read online

  Dark falls on this mid-western town

  where we once lived when myths collided.

  Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river

  which slides and deepens

  to become the water

  the hero crossed on his way to hell.

  Not far from here is our old apartment.

  We had a kitchen and an Amish table.

  We had a view. And we discovered there

  love had the feather and muscle of wings

  and had come to live with us,

  a brother of fire and air.

  We had two infant children one of whom

  was touched by death in this town

  and spared: and when the hero

  was hailed by his comrades in hell

  their mouths opened and their voices failed and

  there is no knowing what they would have asked

  about a life they had shared and lost.

  I am your wife.

  It was years ago.

  Our child is healed. We love each other still.

  Across our day-to-day and ordinary distances

  we speak plainly. We hear each other clearly.

  And yet I want to return to you

  on the bridge of the Iowa river as you were,

  with snow on the shoulders of your coat

  and a car passing with its headlights on:

  I see you as a hero in a text—

  the image blazing and the edges gilded—

  and I long to cry out the epic question

  my dear companion:

  Will we ever live so intensely again?

  Will love come to us again and be

  so formidable at rest it offered us ascension

  even to look at him?

  But the words are shadows and you cannot hear me.

  You walk away and I cannot follow.

  THE POMEGRANATE

  The only legend I have ever loved is

  The story of a daughter lost in hell.

  And found and rescued there.

  Love and blackmail are the gist of it.

  Ceres and Persephone the names.

  And the best thing about the legend is

  I can enter it anywhere. And have.

  As a child in exile in

  A city of fogs and strange consonants,

  I read it first and at first I was

  An exiled child in the crackling dusk of

  The underworld, the stars blighted. Later

  I walked out in a summer twilight

  Searching for my daughter at bedtime.

  When she came running I was ready

  To make any bargain to keep her.

  I carried her back past whitebeams.

  And wasps and honey-scented buddleias.

  But I was Ceres then and I knew

  Winter was in store for every leaf

  On every tree on that road.

  Was inescapable for each one we passed.

  And for me.

  It is winter

  And the stars are hidden.

  I climb the stairs and stand where I can see

  My child asleep beside her teen magazines,

  Her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.

  The pomegranate! How did I forget it?

  She could have come home and been safe

  And ended the story and all

  Our heartbroken searching but she reached

  Out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.

  She put out her hand and pulled down

  The French sound for apple and

  The noise of stone and the proof

  That even in the place of death,

  At the heart of legend, in the midst

  Of rocks full of unshed tears

  Ready to be diamonds by the time

  The story was told, a child can be

  Hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.

  The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.

  The suburb has cars and cable television.

  The veiled stars are above ground.

  It is another world. But what else

  Can a mother give her daughter but such

  Beautiful rifts in time?

  If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.

  The legend must be hers as well as mine.

  She will enter it. As I have.

  She will wake up. She will hold

  The papery, flushed skin in her hand.

  And to her lips. I will say nothing.

  MOTHS

  Tonight the air smells of cut grass.

  Apples rust on the branches. Already summer is

  a place mislaid between expectation and memory.

  This has been a summer of moths.

  Their moment of truth comes well after dark.

  Then they reveal themselves at our window—

  ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.

  The books I look up about them are full of legends:

  Ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.

  Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.

  The moon is up. The back windows are wide open.

  Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.

  Once again they are near the windowsill—

  fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,

  which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them

  they will fall down without knowing how

  or why what they steered by became, suddenly,

  what they crackled and burned around. They will perish—

  I am perishing—on the edge and at the threshold of

  the moment all nature fears and tends toward:

  The stealing of the light. Ingenious facsimile.

  And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes

  my child’s shadow longer than my own.

  AT THE GLASS FACTORY IN CAVAN TOWN

  Today it is a swan:

  The guide tells us

  these are in demand.

  The glass is made

  of red lead and potash

  and the smashed bits

  of crystal sinews

  and decanter stoppers

  crated over there—

  she points—and shattered

  on the stone wheel

  rimmed with emery.

  Aromas of stone and

  fire. Deranged singing

  from the grindstone.

  And behind that

  a mirror—my

  daughters’ heads turned

  away in it—garnering

  grindstone and fire.

  The glass blower goes

  to the furnace.

  He takes a pole

  from the earth’s

  core: the earth’s core

  is remembered in

  the molten globe at

  the end of it.

  He shakes the pole

  carefully to and fro.

  He blows once. Twice.

  His cheeks puff and

  puff up: he is

  a cherub at the very

  edge of a cornice with

  a mouthful of zephyrs—

  sweet intrusions into

  leaves and lace hems.

  And now he lays

  the rod on its spindle.

  It is red. It is

  ruddy and cooler.

  It is cool now

  and as clear as

  the distances of this

  county with its drumlins,

  its herons, its closed-

  in waterways on which

  we saw this morning

  as we drove over

  here, a mated pair

  of swans. Such

  blind grace as they

  floated with told us

  they did not know

  that every hour,

  every day, and

  not far away from

  there, they were

  entering the
legend of

  themselves. They gave no

  sign of it. But what

  caught my eye, my

  attention, was the safety

  they assumed as

  they sailed their own

  images. Here, now—

  and knowing that

  the mirror still holds

  my actual flesh—

  I could say to them:

  reflection is the first

  myth of loss. But

  they floated away and

  away from me as if

  no one would ever blow

  false airs on them,

  or try their sinews

  in the fire, at

  the core, and they

  took no care

  not to splinter, they

  showed no fear

  they would end as

  this one which is

  uncut yet still might:

  a substance of its own

  future form, both

  fraction and refraction

  in the deal-wood

  crate at the door

  we will leave by.

  A SPARROW HAWK IN THE SUBURBS

  At that time of year there is a turn in the road where

  the hermit tones and meadow colours of

  two seasons heal into

  one another—

  when the wild ladder of a winter scarf is stored away in

  a drawer eased by candle-grease and lemon balm

  is shaken out from

  the linen press.

  Those are afternoons when the Dublin hills are so close,

  so mauve and blue, we can be certain dark

  will bring rain and

  it does to

  the borrowed shears and the love-seat in the garden where

  a sparrow hawk was seen through the opal-

  white of apple trees

  after Easter. And

  I want to know how it happened that those days of bloom when

  rumours of wings and sightings—always seen by

  someone else, somewhere else—

  filled the air,

  together with a citrus drizzle of petals and clematis opening,

  and shadows waiting on a gradual lengthening

  in the light our children

  stayed up

  later by, over pages of wolves and dragons and learned to

  measure the sanctuary of darkness by a small

  danger—how and why

  they have chilled

  into these April nights I lie awake listening for wings I will

  never see above the cold frames and

  last frosts of our

  back gardens.

  THE WATER CLOCK

  Thinking of ageing on a summer day

  of rain and more rain

  I took a book down from a shelf

  and stopped to read

  and found myself—

  how did it happen?—

  reflecting on

  the absurd creation of the water clock.

  Drops collected

  on the bell-tongues of fuchsia

  outside my window.

  Apple-trees

  dripped. I read about

  the clepsydra: invention of an ancient world,

  which reconciled

  element to argument

  before the alphabet

  had crossed the Hellespont:

  Water dripped

  from above

  and turned a wheel

  which was about to turn

  a dial when I looked up and saw

  the rain had stopped.

  How could they have? I thought.

  Taken an element, that is.

  Which swallowed faces, stars, irises, Narcissus.

  And posed as frost, ice, snow.

  And had a feel for

  the theatre

  and catastrophe of floods. And,

  in an August storm,

  could bring the moon to heel.

  And reduced it

  to this? And the sun came out and

  the afternoon cleared.

  And in half-an-hour—

  maybe even less—

  every trace of rain had disappeared.

  IN WHICH THE ANCIENT HISTORY I LEARN IS NOT MY OWN

  The linen map

  hung from the wall.

  The linen was shiny

  and cracked in places.

  The cracks were darkened by grime.

  It was fastened to the classroom wall with

  a wooden batten on

  a triangle of knotted cotton.

  The colours

  were faded out

  so the red of Empire—

  the stain of absolute possession—

  the mark once made from Kashmir

  to the oast-barns of the Kent

  coast south of us was

  underwater coral.

  Ireland was far away

  and farther away

  every year.

  I was nearly an English child.

  I could list the English kings.

  I could name the famous battles.

  I was learning to recognize

  God’s grace in history.

  And the waters

  of the Irish sea,

  their shallow weave

  and cross-grained blue green

  had drained away

  to the pale gaze

  of a doll’s china eyes—

  a stare without recognition or memory.

  We have no oracles,

  no rocks or olive trees,

  no sacred path to the temple

  and no priestesses.

  The teacher’s voice had a London accent.

  This was London. 1952.

  It was Ancient History Class.

  She put the tip

  of the wooden

  pointer on the map.

  She tapped over ridges and dried-

  out rivers and cities buried in

  the sea and seascapes which

  had once been land.

  And stopped.

  Remember this, children.

  The Roman Empire was

  the greatest Empire

  ever known—

  until our time of course—

  while the Delphic Oracle

  was reckoned to be

  the exact centre

  of the earth.

  Suddenly

  I wanted

  to stand in front of it.

  I wanted to trace over

  and over the weave of my own country.

  To read out names

  I was close to forgetting.

  Wicklow. Kilruddery. Dublin.

  To ask

  where exactly

  was my old house?

  Its brass One and Seven.

  Its flight of granite steps.

  Its lilac tree whose scent

  stayed under your fingernails

  for days.

  For days—

  she was saying—even months,

  the ancients traveled

  to the Oracle.

  They brought sheep and killed them.

  They brought questions about tillage and war.

  They rarely left with more

  than an ambiguous answer.

  THE HUGUENOT GRAVEYARD AT THE HEART OF THE CITY

  It is the immodesty we bring to these

  names which have eased into ours, and

  their graves in the alcove of twilight,

  which shadows their exile:

  There is a flattery in being a destination.

  There is a vanity in being the last resort.

  They fled the Edict of Nantes—

  hiding their shadows on the roads from France—

  and now under brambles and granite

  faith lies low with the lives it

  dispossessed, and the hands it emptied out,

  and the sombre dances they were joined in.
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  The buses turn right at Stephen’s Green.

  Car exhaust and sirens fill the air. See

  the planted wildness of their rest and

  grant to them the least loves asks of

  the living. Say: they had another life once.

  And think of them as they first heard of us—

  huddled around candles and words failing as

  the stubbon tongue of the South put

  oo and an to the sounds of Dublin,

  and of their silver fingers at the windowsill

  in the full moon as they leaned out

  to breathe the sweet air of Nimes

  for the last time, and the flame

  burned down in a dawn agreed upon

  for their heart-broken leave-taking. And

  for their sakes, accept in that moment,

  this city with its colours of sky and day—

  and which is dear to us and particular—

  was not a place to them: merely

  the one witty step ahead of hate which

  is all that they could keep. Or stay.

  THE PARCEL

  There are dying arts and

  one of them is

  the way my mother used to make up a parcel.

  Paper first. Mid-brown and coarse-grained as wood.

  The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly

  or laying flat at Christmas on a pudding bowl.

  It was a big cylinder. She snipped it open

  and it unrolled quickly across the floor.

  All business, all distance.

  Then the scissors.

  Not a glittering let-up but a dour

  pair, black thumb-holes,

  the shears themselves the colour of the rained-

  on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up

  in the season of lilac and snapdragon

  and stood there arguing the rate for

  sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair

  and this one. All-in.

  The ball of twine was coarsely braided

  and only a shade less yellow than

  the flame she held under the blunt

  end of the sealing wax until

  it melted and spread into a brittle

  terracotta medal.

  Her hair dishevelled, her tongue between her teeth,

  she wrote the address in the quarters

  twine had divided the surface into.

  Names and places. Crayon and fountain pen.

  The town underlined once. The country twice.

  It’s ready for the post

  she would say and if we want to know

  where it went to—

  a craft lost before we missed it—watch it go

  into the burlap sack for collection.

  See it disappear. Say

  this is how it died

  out: among doomed steamships and outdated trains,

  the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes,

  next to station names we can’t remember

  on a continent we no longer