A woman's dreams are visited by creatures that need something from her: a bear that can never drink enough, a half-broken cat she nurses back to life, a dead whale she walks inside like a room. In each dream she is a caretaker or a solitary explorer, and the feeling is quiet, strange and a little lonely. Even the brief sign of Jonah, asleep inside the whale, only underlines how often she is alone.
The last stanza changes everything. A living whale appears with a woman riding it, and the dreamer recognizes her as herself. She feels the rider's strong arms and the whale's flukes as one body. The thirst that ran through the earlier dreams, the bear's especially, is finally satisfied. The mood moves from watchful and sorrowful to luminous and joyful. The poem seems to suggest that after tending need and death, she can become whole and alive.