Most poems about dreams begin with the dream. Dave Bonta's "Cibola 3" begins with waking up, and then lets waking turn out to be less secure than it sounds. The speaker shakes free of "sheets & blankets, of down-filled / quilt," takes a "long, hot shower," drinks coffee. These are the routines meant to hand us back to the daylight world. But the poem argues the opposite: the rituals "give / my mind the chance to keep drifting," so that memory can "make what it will / of the contours of sleep." Sleep here is a landscape with contours, and the morning routine is a slow walk back out of it, with plenty of chances to wander off.
The poem's central idea is that the border between waking and dreaming is porous, and that the strangest thing about dreams is how reasonable they feel from inside. The turning point is the line "Oddest of all are the dreams in which / one awakes, forgetting all rituals." This is a false awakening, a dream of getting up that skips the shower and the coffee. In that state, "it seems normal to go out naked, / for instance, in the middle of winter." The phrase "for instance" is wonderfully casual, as if the speaker were offering a mild example in a conversation. The poem imitates dream logic by delivering absurdity in a reasonable tone.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no fixed rhythm, only plain speech broken into short lines. Bonta lets the line endings do quiet work. "Give" hangs at the end of a line before the mind's "drifting" arrives, and the sentence about waking is itself interrupted by dashes, as though the poem were taking its own detour. The pronouns slide as well, from "I" to the impersonal "one" and then to a direct address: "The snow's alive, remember?" That "remember?" is a small, clever stroke. It assumes the reader already knows the snow is alive, which is how dreams work: they hand you facts you never learned and make you feel you always knew them. For a moment we are pulled inside the dream's certainty.
The imagery in the last four lines is where the poem opens up. The snow "ripples," a verb that belongs to water. Then "blue flames slip / through the trees like fish," which crosses fire, water and animal life in one image. Flames don't slip, and trees aren't water, but the simile makes the forest into a current with something swimming through it. Blue is a cold colour attached to a hot thing, so even the fire is ambiguous. The scene is built from opposites: hot shower against winter snow, quilted warmth against nakedness, flame against ice. The poem keeps setting comfort beside exposure and then removing the comfort.
The last line, "I feel fur sprouting all along my spine," answers that exposure. The body adapts to the winter by becoming an animal's. The sentence is short, flat and has no exclamation, and the poem ends there with no explanation. The speaker doesn't panic or wake up, and the verb "feel" suggests a sensation to be noticed rather than feared. After all the human comforts of quilt, shower and coffee, the ending suggests a different kind of belonging, one in which the speaker is no longer sheltered from the living world but part of it.
The title is worth a moment. "Cibola" is the name of a legendary region of golden cities sought by Spanish explorers, and I read it, as an inference, as a hint that the poem's winter country is a place that exists only as a quest or a story, something reached through imagination. The number 3 suggests this is one part of a sequence, though the poem stands well enough alone.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It makes a large claim, that our daily rituals may be a way of staying in the dream rather than leaving it, through a small domestic scene and a few precise images. It also reminds us that dreams don't feel strange while we are in them. The strangeness only shows when we look back, which is what the speaker is doing at the start: standing in a hot shower, letting the snow come back.