Dream Bardo

A drought in the mouth and the cry of a monkey

Over miles of ocean eats through a woman dreaming

Herself—emergent, awake in a cool cave.

The ground seat there is time taken up by the scruff

And shaken down into one indisputable spot.

What she is certain of is her will to keep

Her eyes open—no blame harbored for her birth,

Or the strawberry mark straddling

Her right breast, not an ounce for the man behind

That porch room with the sun baked shades,

Pull down bed, and dilapidated screens

Dripping with dead fowl and punk weed.

She prefers the memory of a spontaneous rush

Of spring perfume injecting itself into her bloodstream—

Pure gardenia, a true consequence for having done

Something good for someone, she hopes.

Now there’s the anonymous breath,

A hand grabbing inside her chest, not for fruit

But for the flowering. Adam’s buds, a plucking

By a jealous demi-god or asura discovering

An auxiliary garden. Her belief in its dissolve

Is amplified by a subterranean stream

Running through a vertical shaft of light.

Encouraged by this cross

And the white gypsum needles

Strewn like disk blossoms or rosettes on the rocks,

She climbs north like the lust of a man

To touch the peak of a mountain.

She rises for the sanctity of grass and

The unaffected body she left sunbathing

In the secluded center of her hand-tied hammock.