All My Gettings

Lace

Bent over
the open notebook--

light fades out
making trees stand out
and my room
at the back
of the house, dark.

In the dusk
I am still
looking for it--
the language that is

lace:

a baroque obligation
at the wrist
of a prince
in a petty court.
Look, just look
at the way he shake out

the thriftless phrases,
the crystal rhetoric
of bobbined knots
and bosses:
a vagrant drift
of emphasis
to wave away an argument
or frame the hand
he kisses;
which, for all that, is still

what someone
in the corner
of a room,
in the dusk,
bent over
as the light was fading

lost their sight for.

Eavan Boland