Nobody sensible invites an opossum into bed, but dreams aren't sensible, and Dave Bonta's «Valentine's Day dreams» makes the most of that. In nine short lines a night unfolds as a parade of animals: a wild one, then a pampered one, and finally, after waking, a stone one half buried in snow. It looks like a slight, funny sequence of images, but it turns into a quiet meditation on what we welcome in love and what we refuse.
The opening is wonderfully odd. The opossum "crawls into our bed," and the verb gives the animal something low and furtive, while the possessive "our" marks the bed as shared, intimate ground. Then the "you" of the poem speaks: "He's tame, you cry. / Those are just love-bites." The reassurance is almost comic, because nobody explains that bites are harmless unless there is some doubt. "Cry" is ambiguous too. It could mean exclaim, or it could mean something closer to distress. Either way, the line suggests someone defending the intruder. With Valentine's Day in the title, "love-bites" turns a possible wound into a gesture of affection, and the poem lets us watch how easily pain gets relabelled as tenderness.
The second dream flips the first. The cat is everything the opossum isn't: "long-haired," white, "purring and snuggling." Even the sounds are soft. Yet the reaction is "Get her out of here, you groan." "Groan" is the opposite of "cry," weary where the other was protective. The same voice that excused teeth now rejects comfort. The poem never explains, and that restraint is the point. Dream logic doesn't run on fairness, and neither, the poem hints, does desire. Notice also the pronouns: "he" for the opossum, "her" for the cat. Each animal is given just enough personhood to feel like a guest in the bed, and the speaker watches both visits without a word of comment.
Then the poem changes gear. "I wake" is the first appearance of an "I," so the speaker has been a silent witness until now, and the dreams belong to the couple while the waking belongs to one person alone. What this person sees is "a heavy snowfall," where the adjective gives the weather real weight. The old dog statue is "just a bump under the blanket." The "just" echoes the earlier "just love-bites," and both times it plays something down. Here, though, the minimizing is the snow's doing, not a person's. "Blanket" also carries us back to the bed. The snow tucks the statue in as if it were a sleeper, so the crowded, warm bed of the dreams gives way to a yard where the only companion is stone, and even that is disappearing. Whether the statue stands for a lost pet or for something larger, the poem doesn't say. The imagery simply leaves a chill behind the comedy.
The form supports this shift. The poem has three unrhymed tercets in free verse, with no regular meter, and the rhythm is that of speech and quick observation. The first two stanzas move briskly, built on "First" and "Then," and each ends with a spoken reaction. The third stanza drops the dialogue and stretches its lines, so the long, slowing "the old dog statue in the yard" lets the snow settle before the line break delivers "just a bump under the blanket." The enjambment postpones the diminishing phrase, and the last image lands softly and without comment.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It captures the strange, half-comic texture of dreams, but it also sets two contradictory appetites side by side: the willingness to put up with the wild and prickly, and the sudden impatience with what is gentle. The ending doesn't resolve this. It replaces warm, noisy animals with silence and cold, and leaves us to feel the difference. For a Valentine's poem, that is an unusually honest way to look at love: crowded, forgiving in odd places, and surrounded by weather.