Lava Cameo
by Eavan Boland
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 true 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 or 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 touching 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
Image: Italian Bracelet 41269, Walters Art Museum, LA. Public domain. Diana, Pompeii.
