Aubade With Myself Leaving Myself Behind
       

We parted at dawn in the Christmas tree palms.
The older fronds had already started to die

from lethal bronzing. Baskets of red berries
spilled into the swamp. Insomnia, a rumor

of wild hogs rooting in humid fog. Dawn
and her fingers tipped rosy with spoonbills.

We read the inevitable graffiti slashed under concrete
bridges. It advised us to condemn

several businesses and philosophies. Some gods.
Some plants recognize the evening

by folding their leaves like hands in prayer.
As children, we sorted buttons into families.

We wouldn't rest until all of them were named.
Their houses were books that stood upright

as cathedrals that required a forest of trees
to build them. A forest for every page. A page

for every daughter, never for sons. No sons.
We ate our last cheeseburger, shot through

with a syringe of bourbon. The bite broke
the glistening corners of our mouths.

Outside our doctor's office, roseate spoonbills
took flight. Tests showed blood

in our urine and an imagined fire in our mind,
real numbers too low and real numbers

too high. Only birds brighten as they mature.
All night we wondered if maybe the trees

had run out of love for us. We dreamed
that a palm frond grew legs and chased us

through the overgrowth. Our vascular system
glowed in the dark. Maybe love had run out

the way a light bulb sometimes flickers
then explodes. Glass shards, involuntary

seashells. The gulf, a morose bathtub. We parted
in nouns and verbs, splitting time

like the hour in a painting versus the hour in a living
room during a hurricane no one plotted

until the unlatched windows blew. Dawn became
dawn became dawn became dawn

even though it stormed. I couldn't know
the one when everything would change.

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Copyright © 2021 Anne Barngrover All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission