In a Time of Violence Read online

  recognize. The sealing wax cracking.

  The twine unravelling. The destination illegible.

  LAVA CAMEO

  (A brooch carved on volcanic rock)

  I like this story—

  My grandfather was a sea captain.

  My grandmother always met him when his ship docked.

  She feared the women at the ports—

  except that it is not a story,

  more a rumour or a folk memory,

  something thrown out once in a random conversation;

  a hint merely.

  If I say wool and lace for her skirt and

  crepe for her blouse

  in the neck of which is pinned a cameo,

  carved out of black, volcanic rock;

  if I make her pace the Cork docks, stopping

  to take down her parasol as a gust catches

  the silk tassels of it—

  then consider this:

  there is a way of making free with the past,

  a pastiche of what is

  real and what is

  not, which can only be

  justified if you think of it

  not as sculpture but syntax:

  a structure extrinsic to meaning which uncovers

  the inner secret of it:

  She will die at thirty-one in a fever ward.

  He will drown nine years later in the Bay of Biscay.

  They will never even be

  sepia, and so I put down

  the gangplank now between the ship and the ground.

  In the story, late afternoon has become evening.

  They kiss once, their hands touch briefly.

  Please.

  Look at me, I want to say to her: show me

  the obduracy of an art which can

  arrest a profile in the flux of hell.

  Inscribe catastrophe.

  THE SOURCE

  The adults stood

  making sounds of disappointment.

  We were high up in the Wicklow hills,

  in a circle of whins and lilacs.

  We were looking for the source of a river.

  We never found it.

  Instead, we drove to its northern edge.

  And there the river leaned into the afternoon—

  all light, all intrusion—

  the way a mirror interrupts a room.

  See me kneeling in a room

  whose boundary

  is fog and the dusk of a strange city.

  The mirror shows a child in bad light.

  From the inlaid box I lift up something

  closed in tissue paper.

  My mother’s hair. A whole coil of it.

  It is the colour of corn harvested in darkness.

  As the light goes,

  I hold in my hand the coarse weight and

  hopeless safe-keeping

  and there comes back to me

  the dialect of the not-found.

  Maybe. Nearly. It could almost be.

  LEGENDS

  for Eavan Frances

  Tryers of firesides,

  twilights. There are no tears in these.

  Instead, they begin the world again,

  making the mountain ridges blue

  and the rivers clear and the hero fearless—

  and the outcome always undecided

  so the next teller can say begin and

  again and astonish children.

  Our children are our legends.

  You are mine. You have my name.

  My hair was once like yours.

  And the world

  is less bitter to me

  because you will retell the story.

  III

  Anna Liffey

  ANNA LIFFEY

  Life, the story goes,

  Was the daughter of Cannan,

  And came to the plain of Kildare.

  She loved the flatlands and the ditches

  And the unreachable horizon.

  She asked that it be named for her.

  The river took its name from the land.

  The land took its name from a woman.

  •

  A woman in the doorway of a house.

  A river in the city of her birth.

  •

  There, in the hills above my house,

  The river Liffey rises, is a source.

  It rises in rush and ling heather and

  Black peat and bracken and strengthens

  To claim the city it narrated.

  Swans. Steep falls. Small towns.

  The smudged air and bridges of Dublin.

  •

  Dusk is coming.

  Rain is moving east from the hills.

  If I could see myself

  I would see

  A woman in a doorway.

  Wearing the colours that go with red hair.

  Although my hair is no longer red.

  •

  I praise

  The gifts of the river.

  Its shiftless and glittering

  Retelling of a city,

  Its clarity as it flows,

  In the company of runt flowers and herons,

  Around a bend at Islandbridge

  And under thirteen bridges to the sea.

  Its patience at twilight—

  Swans nesting by it,

  Neon wincing into it.

  •

  Maker of

  Places, remembrances,

  Narrate such fragments for me:

  One body. One spirit.

  One place. One name.

  The city where I was born.

  The river that runs through it.

  The nation which eludes me.

  Fractions of a life

  It has taken me a lifetime

  To claim.

  •

  I came here in a cold winter.

  I had no children. No country.

  I did not know the name for my own life.

  My country took hold of me.

  My children were born.

  I walked out in a summer dusk

  To call them in.

  One name. Then the other one.

  The beautiful vowels sounding out home.

  •

  Make of a nation what you will

  Make of the past

  What you can—

  There is now

  A woman in a doorway.

  It has taken me

  All my strength to do this.

  Becoming a figure in a poem.

  Usurping a name and a theme.

  •

  A river is not a woman.

  Although the names it finds,

  The history it makes

  And suffers—

  The Viking blades beside it,

  The muskets of the Redcoats,

  the flames of the Four Courts

  Blazing into it—

  Are a sign.

  Anymore than

  A woman is a river,

  Although the course it takes,

  Through swans courting and distraught willows,

  Its patience

  Which is also its powerlessness,

  From Callary to Islandbridge,

  And from source to mouth,

  Is another one.

  And in my late forties

  Past believing

  Love will heal

  What language fails to know

  And needs to say—

  What the body means—

  I take this sign

  And I make this mark:

  A woman in the doorway of her house.

  A river in the city of her birth.

  The truth of a suffered life.

  The mouth of it.

  •

  The seabirds come in from the coast.

  The city wisdom is they bring rain.

  I watch them from my doorway.

  I see them as arguments of origin—

  Leaving a harsh force on the horizon,
/>   Only to find it

  Slanting and falling elsewhere.

  Which water—

  The one they leave or the one they pronounce—

  Remembers the other?

  I am sure

  The body of an ageing woman

  Is a memory

  And to find a language for it

  Is as hard

  As weeping and requiring

  These birds to cry out as if they could

  Recognize their element

  Remembered and diminished in

  A single tear.

  An ageing woman

  Finds no shelter in language.

  She finds instead

  Single words she once loved

  Such as “summer” and “yellow”

  And “sexual” and “ready”

  Have suddenly become dwellings

  For someone else—

  Rooms and a roof under which someone else

  Is welcome, not her. Tell me,

  Anna Liffey,

  Spirit of water,

  Spirit of place,

  How is it on this

  Rainy autumn night

  As the Irish sea takes

  The names you made, the names

  You bestowed, and gives you back

  Only wordlessness?

  •

  Autumn rain is

  Scattering and dripping

  From carports

  And clipped hedges.

  The gutters are full.

  When I came here

  I had neither

  Children nor country.

  The trees were arms.

  The hills were dreams.

  I was free

  To imagine a spirit

  In the blues and greens,

  The hills and fogs

  Of a small city.

  My children were born.

  My country took hold of me.

  A vision in a brick house.

  Is it only love

  that makes a place?

  I feel it change:

  My children are

  Growing up, getting older.

  My country holds on

  To its own pain.

  I turn off

  The harsh yellow

  Porch light and

  Stand in the hall.

  Where is home now?

  Follow the rain

  Out to the Dublin hills.

  Let it become the river.

  Let the spirit of place be

  A lost soul again.

  •

  In the end

  It will not matter

  That I was a woman. I am sure of it.

  The body is a source. Nothing more.

  There is a time for it. There is a certainty

  About the way it seeks its own dissoloution.

  Consider rivers.

  They are always en route to

  Their own nothingness. From the first moment

  They are going home. And so

  When language cannot do it for us,

  Cannot make us know love will not diminish us,

  There are these phrases

  Of the ocean

  To console us.

  Particular and unafraid of their completion.

  In the end

  Everything that burdened and distinguished me

  Will be lost in this:

  I was a voice.

  STORY

  Two lovers in an Irish wood at dusk

  are hiding from an old and vengeful king.

  The wood is full of sycamore and elder.

  And set in that nowhere which is anywhere:

  And let the woman be slender. As I was at twenty.

  And red-haired. As I was until recently.

  They cling together listening to his hounds

  get nearer in the twilight and the spring

  thickets fill with the sound of danger.

  Blossoms are the colour of blood and capture.

  We can be safe, they say. We can start

  a rumour in the wood to reach the king—

  that she has lost her youth. That her mouth is

  cold. That this woman is growing older.

  They do not know. They have no idea

  how much of this: the ocean-coloured peace

  of the dusk, and the way legend stresses it,

  depend on her to be young and beautiful.

  They start the rumour in the last light.

  But the light changes. The distance shudders.

  And suddenly what is happening is not

  what happens to the lovers in the wood

  or an angry king and his frantic hounds—

  and the tricks and kisses he has planned.

  But what is whispering out of sycamores.

  And over river-noise. And bypasses harebells

  and blue air. And is overheard by the birds

  which are the elements of logic in an early

  spring. And is travelling to enter a suburb

  at the foothills of the mountains in Dublin.

  And a garden with jasmine and poplars. And

  a table at which I am writing. I am writing

  a woman out of legend. I am thinking

  how new it is—this story. How hard it will be to tell.

  WHAT LANGUAGE DID

  The evening was the same as any other.

  I came out and stood on the step.

  The suburb was closed in the weather

  of an early spring and the shallow tips

  and washed-out yellows of narcissi

  resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops.

  I stood there and felt the melancholy

  of growing older in such a season,

  when all I could be certain of was simply

  in this time of fragrance and refrain,

  whatever else might flower before the fruit,

  and be renewed, I would not. Not again.

  A car splashed by in the twilight.

  Peat smoke stayed in the windless

  air overhead and I might have missed it:

  a presence. Suddenly. In the very place

  where I would stand in other dusks, and look

  to pick out my child from the distance,

  was a shepherdess, her smile cracked,

  her arm injured from the mantelpieces

  and pastorals where she posed with her crook.

  Then I turned and saw in the spaces

  of the night sky constellations appear,

  one by one, over roof-tops and houses,

  and Cassiopeia trapped: stabbed where

  her thigh met her groin and her hand

  her glittering wrist, with the pin-point of a star.

  And by the road where rain made standing

  pools of water underneath cherry trees,

  and blossoms swam on their images,

  was a mermaid with invented tresses,

  her breasts printed with the salt of it and all

  the desolation of the North Sea in her face.

  I went nearer. They were disappearing.

  Dusk had turned to night but in the air—

  did I imagine it?—a voice was saying:

  This is what language did to us. Here

  is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness

  of tides and hillsides and stars where

  we languish in a grammar of sighs,

  in the high-minded search for euphony,

  in the midnight rhetoric of poesie.

  We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy.

  We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty.

  Help us to escape youth and beauty.

  Write us out of the poem. Make us human

  in cadences of change and mortal pain

  and words we can grow old and die in.

  WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS WHO DO THIS

  I saw a statue yesterday. A veiled woman.

  Head and shoulders only. Up on a pedestal.

 
A veil of grief covering her whole face.

  I stood there, caught by surprise, my

  car keys getting warmer in one hand,

  both of us women in our middle years,

  but hers were fixed, set and finished in

  a mutton-fat creaminess, a seamless flutter in

  marble revealed by a sudden brightness

  from the window behind me and other parts

  were as dark as the shell of a. swan mussel.

  I saw my mother weep once. It was under

  circumstances I can never, even now,

  weave into or reveal by these cadences.

  As I watched, and I was younger then,

  I could see that weeping itself has no cadence.

  It is unrhythmical, unpredictable and

  the intake of breath one sob needs to

  become another sob, so one tear can succeed

  another, is unmusical: whoever the muse is

  or was of weeping, she has put the sound of it

  beyond the reach of metric-makers, music-makers.

  I went up to her. At the well

  of the throat where tears start,

  there the artist must have started,

  I was sure of it. From there upwards—

  chin, lips, skin lines, eyelids—all

  had been chiselled out with the veil in

  the same, indivisible act of definition

  which had silenced her. No sound. Not one.

  No dissonance of grief in a small room on

  a summer evening. Just a mineral grace

  in which she had found a rhythm to weep by.

  The rhythm of summer was unstoppable: a rapt

  heat waited for the blackbird to say dusk

  is coming, is about to be, will be able to

  fold the ladysmock, cowslips and the grey

  undertips of the mulberry leaves into that

  translucence which is all darkness can be in

  this season. The room was curtained, quiet.

  We sat at right angles. I knew the late

  sun would never make the cinnamon-and-

  chintz pansies on those armrests grow

  more or perish there. And my mother wept.

  An object of the images we make is

  what we are and how we lean out and

  over the perfect surface where

  our features in water greet and save us.

  No weeping there: only the element

  claiming its emblem. A last wheat-coloured

  brightness filled the room. She dried her tears.

  She put one hand up to her throat and pulled,

  between her thumb and forefinger, the rope

  of light there. “Did you know” she said

  “some people say that pearls are tears?”

  I could not ask her, she could not tell me

  why something had once made her weep.

  Had made her cover up her mouth and eyes