Mary Ann Reilly

Winter and the few remaining birds
squat on wires stretched
from pole to pole
alongside the coastline:
dark ink blotches
unmoving.

Dusk comes hard
in this borderland
between longi…

Clouds cross the quarter moon.

We left that Dublin office, traveled
north of Sligo to the seacoast town
of Grange. There I slept the length
of afternoon

Ladies,
it’s a foreign language
we’ve come to speak
here by the water‘s edge,

I am from all of this
from the limbs that formed
those long afternoons
strong in ways I’ve learned to test.

Here in the slight slant
of remaining light,
I see it
is of a young girl
turning
from a door
slightly open.

Perhaps it was nothing more
than the suddenness
of a single black American crow
lifting from the branch
that had me thinking of you.