THE ACHILL WOMAN She came up the hill carrying water. She wore a half-buttoned, wool cardigan, a tea-towel round her waist. She pushed the hair out of her eyes with her free hand and put the bucket down. The zinc-music of the handle on the rim tuned the evening. An Easter moon rose. In the next-door field a stream was a fluid sunset; and then, stars. I remember the cold rosiness of her hands. She bent down and blew them like broth. And round her waist, on a white background, in coarse, woven letters, the words "glass cloth." And she was nearly finished for the day. And I was all talk, raw from college -- weekending at a friend's cottage with one suitcase and the set text of the Court poets of the Silver Age. We stayed putting down time until the evening turned cold without warning. She said goodnight and started down the hill. The grass changed from lavender to black. The trees turned back to cold outlines. You could taste frost but nothing now can change the way I went indoors, chilled by the wind and made a fire and took down my book and opened it and failed to comprehend the harmonies of servitude, the grace music gives to flattery and language borrows from ambition -- and how I fell asleep oblivious to the planets clouding over in the skies, the slow decline of the spring moon, the songs crying out their ironies. -- Ms. Eavan BOLAND "Outside History, selected poems 1980-1990," (W.W. Norton 1990)