Painting by Moonlight
It was a bright inviting, freely formed, though I suppose it was I who brightened, with an internal scattering of light, as though weather maps were more real than the breath of autumn. The low colourfulness of the broken and dying leaves was no embrittlement to every decided colour on the sunlighted grass and the warm-hued wood of his door. But with the dust descending in the glaring white gap my backbone pulped and I closed up like a concertina. His tongue was hushed as Christ's lips or once-red grapes permitting each touch to spread only when the turn of the violet comes.
From My Love Has Fared Inland by Medbh McGuckian. Copyright © 2010 by Medbh McGuckian. Used by permission of Wake Forest University Press.