The Moondial
       

They avoid providing their fingerprints by burning their fingers.

Cups of nighttime water
are all that lifts easily
to another's lips. My ever-giving body
must have self-lit from any red
interruption to the grey they offer.

The city seems to fall into pieces,
steered into a sliding cloud, goes rib
to rib, leans in to run the warning
out of my body where many
wintry things keep adding up.

At least I recognised the yellow thought,
caresses of an arm in days gone by,
or some Februaries that match,
geranium kiss inside the rain.
The flags are frozen, don't move in wind,

they carry no sentiment. Flowers freeze
in liquid air and thick lake-effect snow.
For nineteen days I do the candles
to uncertain saints (why are the saints'
feet silver?). The brown garden,

fatal flower garden, stores a threadbare rose
of pressed blue until the bone blinks through,
until the cease-fire ceases. A sky not bare
of leather stars stands over their heads
in the hunched chapels. Clearly for them

everything had become words. When she read
her sibling's diary, those deserving mother/daughter
dreams, (time can be shared), the blood had begun
like the morning. Cleaning buildings
late at night makes her bleed slowly,
you are that below river wave.

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Copyright © 2019 Medbh McGuckian All rights reserved
from Smartish Pace
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission