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Where I have been living since the beginning of the pandemic, there is no mailman, no mailbox at the end of the driveway, no letterbox in the front door. To send or receive a letter, we have to drive about a mile to a shop on the carraterra between here and the lovely little village which has been deadly quiet of late. While the package that was mailed to me from Arizona three months ago and then disappeared after spending most of these three months in Mexico city, the postcards I have sent to Phoenix and Derry and Limerick and Belfast have all been received. It gladdens me to think of my mother, isolated with my dad in their Castledawson home until this time of Corona passes, turning over a postcard from an impossibly far away Tlaquepaque and seeing my handwriting for the first time in years.
It was because of Eavan Boland that I began sending picture postcards. Thinking about her lately, the way I think about Seamus Heaney, whose words have scored so much of my life, it comes to me that she had – past tense – that way of knowing the things that matter most to people, those routines and rituals that shape our ways of being in the world. She knew how to make personal the political and the public.
THE LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING
The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.
The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers
Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,
Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:
First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,
The lighter stroke, which brought back
Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel
Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass
Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn
Again just in time for the May Novenas
Recited in sweet air on a road leading
To another road, then another one, widening
To a motorway with four lanes, ending in
A new town on the edge of a city
They will never see. And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see
The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became
Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew
By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?
Eavan Boland
On the desk in the room that I should use as a writing room, sits a little plastic bag of scenic postcards, bought in a grocery store in nearby Chapala before we were ordered to stay home. I plan to send them all, these ‘wish-you-were-heres’ to the ones who know me best – to my own ones. I am hoping the letter writer I used to be will return and take advantage of the hours now available to shape various tidings with the very best words I can find – there is only so much room on a post card, even less than on that red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail – par avion.
I sent two postcards this morning and when I returned to sit and stare out from the beautiful kitchen of a home that is not yet home, I read online that Eavan Boland died today after suffering a major stroke.
With the passing of Eavan Boland Ireland has lost not only an internationally acclaimed poet, distinguished academic and author, but one of the most insightful inner sources of Irish life, not only in life as expressed but as sensed and experienced.
President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins
Boland had been teaching at Stanford University in California, only returning to Ireland a month ago to be close to her family in light of the covid-19 pandemic and its attendant stay-at-home orders. Absorbing the news of her death, my mind wanders to her poem, “Quarantine.” In just twenty spare lines, she tells the story of an unnamed husband and wife during the Irish Famine, that catastrophic period described by former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, as the event ‘which more than any other shaped us as a people. It defined our will to survive. It defined our sense of human vulnerability.“
Honoring the dead couple in the poem, Boland honors forever over a million people, many of them nameless, who lost their lives to starvation and disease. Sitting in my house, far from home, reading online daily updates of thousands more Covid-19 deaths all over the world, I am reminded of this, and of why, in Boland’s own words, she wrote Quarantine, the poem that would eventually be one of ten shortlisted for RTÉ’s selection of Ireland’s favorite poems of the last 100 years in 2015 – “to bring together so much of the public agony and private experience of the Ireland of that time. Just a terrible parable of people on the dark side of history, who somehow amend it for a moment by the grace of their actions.”
Amazing grace.
Quarantine
Eavan Boland – 1944-2020
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
