This week’s poem, Lucia Owen’s “The Dream Again, with Cats,” presents a recurring realm of winter, need and vision. I love this poem’s grayscale palette charged with a cat’s green eyes, and the rich symbols of desire and self that this dream manifests.

Owen lives in western Maine where she taught high school English before retiring. Her work has appeared in The Cafe Review, Rust+Moth, Prospectus, Spire, “A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis,” “Wait: Poems from the Pandemic” and, most recently, “Writing the Land: Maine.”

The Dream Again, with Cats
By Lucia Owen

This time I find the small gray cat
only a bit darker than the winter twilight
the color of the dream, of the dark
just below my heart, stepping

one paw after the other
into the same prints over snow
also gray striped by sinking light
and she curls up on the snow

next to the corner of a concrete wall,
looks up at me with green jungle eyes
and meows. This time she lets me
pick her up bring her inside

where she jumps onto the laundry
on the sofa, slow blinks at me and I
find my emergency cat food stash
in case a cat finds me and stays and I

rescue it and so I am rescued again
and she jumps down from the sofa
this time watching her settle
to eat opens my need and when I wipe

my eyes this time there’s a mirror
I look at then walk through
into dead leaves mixed with old snow
this time inside the mirror the cat is

white-haired, gaunt, gazing at me,
not blinking,
eyes my color.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Dream Again, with Cats,” copyright 2023 by Lucia Owen, was published in Please See Me. It appears by permission of the author.

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