After Afterlude
       

The leather boats lift themselves
Away from their ropes on easy hinges.
One passes the land of the dead
On the bus into town. One returns
From the root of the sky tcr91ed
In icicles. I focus on their glasslike
Feel, their crystal breathturn.

What do you mean, I am rapid,
Flying on breathways? No one
Really dreams any more, the bread
Of the dream, the haste of the dream,
Yet anyone who awakes has overslept
The look of night, grass Written asunder.

My heart passes through the pause,
The whirring woods, the nettle message
Of the ghetto-rose, that petalless flower.
I imagined God as a book, not
Where you cannot be, eternalized,
Noneternal you, reader in the after
World, dropping your ghost-rosary.

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Copyright © 2012 Medbh McGuckian All rights reserved
from The Cincinnati Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission