She sits across from the beggar in the lamplight and tells him the dream that woke her. Twenty geese feeding on grain in her courtyard. An eagle came down, not swooping, falling, as though something had torn open the world. He took them one by one. Their necks broke like reed stems. Feathers drifted across the stone like snow. She was screaming and no sound came out. Then she gives the interpretation herself. The eagle is a man with a sword, gone twenty years. The geese are the men eating her stores. The dream says he is coming and there will be blood. Or it means nothing. Dreams are the mind’s noise after a long day. [SPOILER: She says both because she does not yet know, or will not yet let herself know, that she is telling the dream to its eagle. She watches his face for confirmation. He gives her none. The whole scene is her testing him without seeming to test, and the omen and the man at the same fire is one of the quiet jokes the poem keeps making.]
The Eagle-and-Geese Dream
Twenty geese in her courtyard. An eagle drops out of the sky and breaks their necks like reed stems. She tells the dream and watches the stranger's face.