As a child cries, all over, I kept insisting
on robin's egg blue tiles about the fireplace,
which gives a room a kind of flying-heartedness.
Only that tiny slice of the house absorbed
my perfume--like a kiss sliding off into
a three-sided mirror--like a red-brown girl
in cuffless trousers we add to ourselves by looking.
She had the boy-girl body of a flower,
moving once and for all past the hermetic front door.
I knew she was drinking blue and it had dried
in her; she carried it wide awake in herself
ever after, and it's music blew that other look
to bits. If what she hunted for could fit my eyes,
I would shine in the window of her blood like wine,
or perfume, or till nothing was left of me but listening.
--Medbh McGuckian