The black bird that has been with me all my life
comes and sits on my shoulder and whets its beak
like a woman with perfume, always adding touches.
Touches of red, all stillborn.
I always had a set of dayclothes by my bed.
Our look is what kept the icy-cold pages unread.
Tie the petticoat tighter, as I was kissed yester e’en
by a man from whom pure spirit flashes from time to time:
taking a kiss outside time, a small fence of kisses.
Moon, bird and flower watcher, I picked out his rooftop
on the wrists of each day, all the rooms but one
without light, far more threatened than birds.
They call September the part in the hair, they call
the season ten, depending on how the joints
of the year are going. From a single family
of lightly travelled streets, from the guncotton
dried there, a second thread moon
in a sky of German blue falls on the elbow
of our opened river. Is cuma liom.
I walk impossibly uphill
with the collar hurting my decayed aura.
Our mothers thought by eights instead of tens.