Aubade

Dreams conclude with the crossing of paths —
ancestors breathing Visigoth smoke in Celtic fog.

I fly past gray-brown pulverized leaves.
Bird and elk prints blur through wild grasses.

The colorful sleeves of a Chinese student flutter
unlike the injured butterfly stunned in her hand.

A blue tiger, she tells me, like a wave from the sea.
Is rain forecast?

Where is the small table that holds my poems?
My husband ambles from his sleep.

Mind letting go, face flushed with sun.
The remembered meeting of the man from a northern

border town, his tiger wasps released to the sky,
miles of wounded trees, torrents of water.

Does the river imagine the ocean as its lord?
Someone sweeps a hand across my breasts.

An animal I can’t name, delicately hooved,
feeds on berries by a stream.

I am that Monarch who exposes a hair-thin
streak of blood on her wing.

The sun surrenders to clouds.
Body, open to morning, red water wake me.