Ocean

I wake: snow in the garden, spouse asleep beside me like a
pinprick of light in the distance, a stopped train—I’ve been
dreaming of Tomas Tranströmer. The dream dangles over
a cliff—I cling to its meaning, but it slips from my fingers,
I fall back to sleep. Again, his green ocean pushes up
through palazzo floors—Good evening, beautiful deep!—
and just as I feel joy rising, the plot changes, faces of
dictators peeling away one after the other until it’s
snowing, snowflakes piling up while the moon watches.
Now it’s clear I am the night’s experiment, another set of
variables to test, and thus subject to slow cruelties—like
those infant monkeys whisked away at birth and assigned
inanimate mothers: either a cloth mannequin or a naked
metal skeleton, both providing basic sustenance but
nothing else. Those dreams in which you can’t move; those
dreams in which you understand everything, and have
everything to say, but can’t speak. As when the ocean ices
over, freezes six-feet thick all around your ship, yet still
you feel it rising and falling, rising and falling. Wanting to
wake from the dream. Wanting to stay asleep.

Jennifer Stewart Miller holds an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University. She’s the author of A Fox Appears: a biography of a boy in haiku (self-published 2015), and her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart and appeared in Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, and other journals. Her chapbook The Strangers Burial Ground is forthcoming in Fall 2019 from Seven Kitchens Press.