..and no one to tell us, now or ever, why it ends, why it always ends.
~Eavan Boland
194 notes
·
View notes
Nocturne
by Eavan Boland
After a friend has gone I like the feel of it:
The house at night. Everyone asleep.
The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening.
One-o-clock. A floral tea pot and a raisin scone.
A tray waits to be taken down.
The landing light is off. The clock strikes. The cat
comes into his own, mysterious on the stairs,
a black ambivalence around the legs of button-back
chairs, an insinuation to be set beside
the red spoon and the salt-glazed cup,
the saucer with the thick spill of tea
which scalds off easily under the tap. Time
is a tick, a purr, a drop. The spider
on the dining room window has fallen asleep
among complexities as I will once
the doors are bolted and the keys tested
and the switch turned up of the kitchen light
which made outside in the garden
an electric room--a domestication
of closed daisies, an architecture
instant and improbable.
130 notes
·
View notes
(...) they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.
Eavan Boland, from Atlantis - A Lost Sonnet in “Domestic Violence: Poems”
396 notes
·
View notes
I was born in a place where rain
is second nature, where a hooded coat,
ready on the hook,
was never out of reach. Nor
do I believe like Plato, or even
his late revisionists, that landscape
is the corporeal purpose
of our minds. I always knew
rain was a dialect I could listen to
on a winter night: its sibilance.
even now, on a wet evening,
I watch as twilight comes
to the old graveyard above the main
road of our village and I am glad for
whoever lies there that this
elemental companion has not,
and never will, abandon them.
Rain by Eavan Boland
11 notes
·
View notes
Inheritance
I have been wondering
what I have to leave behind, to give my daughters.
No good offering the view
between here and Three Rock Mountain,
the blueness in the hours before rain, the long haze afterwards.
The ground I stood on was never really mine. It might not ever be theirs.
And gifts that were passed through generations—
silver and the fluid light left after silk—were never given here.
This is an island of waters, inland distances,
with a history of want and women who struggled
to make the nothing which was all they had
into something they could leave behind.
I learned so little from them: the lace bobbin with its braided mesh,
its oat-straw pillow and the wheat-colored shawl
knitted in one season
to imitate another
are all crafts I never had
and can never hand on. But then again there was a night
I stayed awake, alert and afraid, with my first child
who turned and turned; sick, fretful.
When dawn came I held my hand over the absence of fever,
over skin which had stopped burning, as if I knew the secrets
of health and air, as if I understood them
and listened to the silence
and thought, I must have learned that somewhere.
~~Eavan Boland
8 notes
·
View notes
Diana Wallace quoting Mary Wollstonecraft | Virginia Woolf | Eavan Boland
196 notes
·
View notes
Amber
It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:
trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping—
a plastic gold dropping
through seasons and centuries to the ground—
until now.
On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent
I am holding, as if my hand could store it,
an ornament of amber
you once gave me.
Reason says this:
The dead cannot see the living.
The living will never see the dead again.
The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet
this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell
which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were
as though the past could be present and memory itself
a Baltic honey—
a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much
can be kept safe
inside a flawed translucence.
-- Eavan Boland
8 notes
·
View notes
This Moment
Eavan Boland
A neighborhood.
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.
27 notes
·
View notes
"At what point does an actual, exact landscape—those details which are recurrent and predictable—begin to blur and soften? Sometimes on a summer evening, walking between my house and a neighbor’s, past the whitebeam trees and the bicycles left glinting in the dusk, I could imagine that I myself was a surreal and changing outline, that there was something almost profound in these reliable shadows, that such lives as mine and my neighbors’ were mythic, not because of their strangeness but because of their powerful ordinariness."
Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time
18 notes
·
View notes
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
Eavan Boland
I found it among curios 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 is 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.
3 notes
·
View notes
L’alba
E’ questa l’ora che amo l’ora intermedia, né di qui né di là.
E’ questo il momento in cui lavoro meglio salgo le scale in due stati d’animo, in due mondi lasciando giù qualcosa, prendendo con me qualcosa.
L’ora del cambiamento della metamorfosi, delle instabilità che mutano forma.
E io vedo ciò che posso diventare.
Eavan Boland
9 notes
·
View notes
Photography by Gina Iacob
Night; an oratory of dark, a chapel of unreason.
~Eavan Boland
1K notes
·
View notes
11 notes
·
View notes
Eavan Boland, from Falling Asleep To The Sound of Rain in “Domestic Violence: Poems”
215 notes
·
View notes
At twilight in
the shadow of the poplars
the children found a swarm of wild bees.
It was late summer and I knew as
they came shouting in that, yes,
this evening had been singled out by
a finger pointing at trees,
the inland feel of that greenness,
the sugar-barley iron of a garden chair
ad children still bramble-height
and fretful from the heat and a final
brightness stickle-backing that particular
patch of grass across which light
was short-lived and elegiac as
the view from a train window of
a station parting, all tears. And this—
this I thought, is how it will have been
chosen from those summer evenings
which under the leaves of the poplars—
striped dun and ochre, simmering over
the stashed-up debris of old seasons—
a swarm of wild bees is making use of.
We Are Human History. We Are Not Natural History. by Eavan Boland
8 notes
·
View notes
The Lost Land
I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.
I also wanted one piece of ground.
One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.
So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.
Now they are grown up and far away
and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape.
Where the hills
are the colours of a child’s eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons.
At night,
on the edge of sleep,
I can see the shore of Dublin Bay,
its rocky sweep and its granite pier.
Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,
shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then
I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.
I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land.
Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
~~Eavan Boland
4 notes
·
View notes