When the cobbler shop closed in our village
with a hand-written note in the window
and an apology
on a wintry evening,
while crows sat with big shoulders,
their backs turned in the last shiver of light,
I was driven
not to elegy but etymology:
Ceapail perhaps, meaning binding or fettering?
Klabba from the Swedish?
More likely cobolere, to mend shoes.
As if the origin of a word we used
without thinking could help us deal
with what we were about to lose
without thinking:
a small room
gloomy with machines, with
a hand crank and a leather treadle
where I saw a woman standing,
years ago, her paired shoes
in her hands and already
I was placing them in some ideal
river village
where someone said
I’ll make up a bed for you
and immediately
I could hear the chime
of another childhood: a spare room
perfumed by windfalls in one corner,
porcelain ornaments on a traycloth,
a painting on the wall of a flowered lane
I wanted them to walk down
until they wandered
into the dusk
of another word: this time nostalgia.
The first part of it nostos, meaning
the return home.
—Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland was an Irish poet who taught at Stanford. She died on April 27, 2020.
