Dream In Montana Poem by Amber Flora Thomas

The ice splits over Blackfoot River. A moose comes
off the mountain to walk the avenues and neighborhood dogs
register their wildest complaints. Dry air. Dry want.
Snowbanks black from traffic glow, blue in the streetlight.
I walk along immutable passages where porch lights,
summoned by my footfall, turn on.
I don't think of the man.
In the blurred titanium of a dream, his body
swims toward her, easy breaststrokes.
Tonight, she grants him sleep as she roams the rooms
of their house. She grants him her certainty
that there is safety to be had.
From the street, I watch her write
in the yellow dim of a lamp, her stolen time,
with her feet tucked under a blanket. A portrait
with poppies like eyes gazes down at her from the wall.
I do not know what is innocent between friends.
Her reading Blake into the phone, a parchment
spelling out twenty uses for difficult. She exists
where the world suspends its fragment of feeling.
A paper falls from her lap and stays, leaning against the chair leg.
Had I agreed to meet here, where midnight
wants to be about mystery? Only sleeplessness
ushers me in. The moose and I pass invisible to one another.
I should have stones for this journey, lead weights
from fishing lines. Then would she know me, north leaving,
south arriving at their red house. If I were daring
I'd come to her window more dashing than a cardinal in winter
and flaunt my shining coat.