EAVAN BOlAND
In a Bad Light
This is St. Louis. Where the rivers meet. The Illinois. The Mississippi.
The Missouri.
The light is in its element of Autumn. Clear. With yellow Ginko leaves
falling.
There is always a nightmare. Even in such light.
The weather must be cold now in Dublin. And when skies are clear frosts
come
down on the mountains and the first inklings of winter will be underfoot
m
the crisp iron of a fern at dawn.
I stand in a room in the Museum. In one glass case a plastic figure
represents a woman in a dress with crepe sleeves and a satin apron.
And feet laced neatly into suede.
She stands in a replica of a cabin on a steamboat bound for New Orleans.
The year is 1860. Nearly war. A notice says no comforts were spared.
The silk is French. The seamstresses are Irish.
I see them in the oil-lit parlours. I am in the gas-lit backrooms. We make
in the apron front and from the papery appearance and crushable look
of crepe a sign. We are bent over
in a bad light. We are sewing a last sight of shore. We are sewing coffin
ships
and the salt of exile. And our own death in it. For history's abandonment
we are doing this. And this. And
this is a buttonhole. This is a stitch. Fury enters them as frost follows
every
arabesque and curl of a fern . This is the nightmare. See how you perceive
it:
We sleep the sleep of exhaustion.
