Aubade for Aurora

 

Before that late hour of blue cheese

and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine,

 

she asks me questions I cannot answer simply:

forget night’s history, the weight of excuse?

 

I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold.

Will salutations tangle into word games

 

and betray the desire to love a while longer?

Her naked confidence is as unabashed as arrogance forgiven.

 

Her gown sweeps the spiders’ dew:

lint of wherewithal, might-have-been, the else to do.

 

At the window, she does not have to guess

the dreams of this world, its humble corners.

 

She walks through orchards: they buzz to bloom,

shadows jump stone walls in glee, the moon sinks to pale regret.

 

She walks trails with no stumbles or switchbacks,

coaxes crows across a frontiered sky.

 

Early coffee to wake, scones in their sacrifice;

I plead with her stay, stay, but she does not look back

 

at the bed we shared: I hear only whispers

of hinge pins swinging their partners away.

 

Frederick Wilbur

Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise. His work appears in many periodicals, including The Atlanta Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).