Dear Ems,
No, I can’t just send these to Varric. He’s read half of them already, and the other half I’m sure he’ll find himself. Varric doesn’t need my help, at least, not with this matter. More importantly, while I have been known to be a dwarf from time to time, that doesn’t make him my cousin.
You are.
Family is a rare thing here, Ems, so please, indulge me. Let me have this responsibility. Let me tell you about what a beautiful and terrible world this is: not Thedas, not the Xbox, no. The world that made and will surely destroy us, but not, I hope, before we spend our shimmering instant in the sun. Let me give you the opportunity to feel, absent the light of that sun, how the people who saw by it did and do.
This one is a story about lovers. Or, maybe it will be? Eavan Boland is still deciding, if snow really does fall around them, if aconites bloom where they walk, if they ever held each other. She is aware that whatsoever she says could one day pass into myth, and so become true as it gains meaning in the minds of others, as it subtly guides them. She is speaking people into being, and she does so with a reverence I like to think was present when we were first spoken, you and I. Before we were people, Ems, we were myths, we were instructive. You would do well to think on what it is you were to teach, to decide whether or not you stand for it still.
Sincerely,
Daylen
2011-06-12
Listen. This is the Noise of Myth
This is the story of a man and
woman under a willow and beside a weir
near a river in a wooded clearing.
They are fugitives. Intimates of myth.
Fictions of my purpose. I suppose
I shouldn’t say that yet or at least
before I break their hearts or save their lives
I ought to tell their story and I will.
When they went first it was winter; cold,
cold through the Midlands and as far West
as they could go. They knew they had to go-
through Meath, Weastmeath, Longford,
their lives unraveling like the hours of light-
and then there were lambs under the snow
and it was January, aconite and jasmine
and the hazel yellowing and puce berries on the ivy.
They could not eat where they had cooked,
nor sleep where they had eaten
nor at dawn rest where they had slept.
They shunned the densities
of trees with one trunk and of caves
with one dark and the dangerous embrace
of islands with a single landing place.
And all the time it was cold, cold:
the fields still gardened by their ice,
the trees stitched with snow overnight,
the ditches full; frost toughening lichen,
darning lace into rock crevices.
And then the woods flooded and buds
blunted from the chestnut and the foxglove
put its big leaves out and chaffinches
chinked and flirted in the branches of the ash.
And here we are where we started from-
under a willow and beside a weir
near a river in a wooded clearing,
The woman and the man have come to rest.
Look how light is coming through the ash.
The weir sluices kingfisher blues.
The woman and the willow tree lean forward, forward.
Something is near; something is about to happen;
something more than Spring
and less than history. Will we see
hungers eased after months of hiding?
Is there a touch of heat in that light?
If they stay soon it will be summer; things
returning, sunlight fingering minnowy deeps,
seedy greens, reeds, electing lights
and edges from the river. Consider
legend, self-deception, sin, the sum
of human purposes and its end; remember
how our poetry depends on distance,
aspect: gravity will bend starlight
Forgive me if I set the truth to rights.
Bear with me if I put an end to this:
She never turned to him; she never leaned
under the sallow-willow over to him.
They never made love; not there; not here;
not anywhere; there was no winter journey;
no aconite, no birdsong, no jasmine,
no woodland and no river and no weir.
Listen. This is the noise of myth.It makes
the same sound as shadow. Can you hear it?
Daylight greys in the preceptories.
Her head begins to shine
pivoting the planets of harsh nativity.
They were never mine. This is mine.
This sequence of evicted possibilities.
Displaced facts. Tricks of light. Reflections.
Invention. Legend. Myth. What you will.
The shifts and fluencies are infinite.
The moving parts are marvellous. Consider
how the bereavements of the definite
are easily lifted from our heroine.
She may or she may not. She was or wasn’t
by the water at his side as dark
waited above the Western countryside.
O consolations of the craft.
How we put
the old poultices on the old sores,
the same mirrors to the old magic. Look.
The scene returns. The willow sees itself
drowning in the weir and the woman
gives the kiss of myth her human heat.
Reflections. Reflections. He becomes her lover.
The old romances make no bones about it.
The long and short of it. The end and the beginning.
The glories and the ornaments are muted.
And when the story ends the song is over.
– Eavan Boland, 1986