An old woman lies connected to an oxygen tank and, instead of complaining, tells us where she has been. That is the whole situation of "Dreamer," and its central idea is that a life, even a conventional one, ends up as a story the dying person must piece together, and that she can face the ending with humour and nerve. Dave Bonta gives her a voice so relaxed and so full of farm-country idiom that we almost miss how much the poem is doing underneath.
The opening shows the method. She recalls learning "all the arcana of knots & hitches" from her brothers, then mentions that she recalls them "now, tied to an oxygen tank, / the transparent umbilicus bridled to my nostrils." The horse language is quietly cruel: she was once the rider holding the reins, and now she is the animal in the tack. "Umbilicus" turns the tube into a birth cord, so the end of life loops back to its beginning. The poem keeps making this kind of loop.
The second stanza sets her against her husband. He loved the country for its "practical puzzles"; she preferred the sea's "implausible clues." The sea she describes is full of strange, half-mathematical images: a beach "asymptotic to the hyperbole of waves" (a line that approaches the water without ever quite touching it), anemones "like stars collapsing, turning inward," shells "pressing their ears to the sand." The collapsing stars anticipate her failing body, and the listening shells anticipate the way she will later lie quietly and hear her mother's songs. She has always been someone who reads messages in things.
Her brief flight from the Clydesdale is the poem's most vivid memory. Standing barefoot on the horse's back, she is thrown when it smells a bear, and she is "really flying, / ponytailed hair & calico skirts ballooning." The word "really" lets the old woman relish a moment she is still proud of, and the image also works as a rehearsal for death: a thrilling loss of ground. Notice that it follows her remark about her Methodist family, "for whom speech was more vital than prayer." She distrusts piety (the minister's "baited candy"), yet her own speech, the monologue we are hearing, becomes the poem's nearest thing to a sacrament.
The form supports this plain-spoken tone. There is no rhyme and no regular meter; the lines are long and conversational, and the ampersands make the speech feel jotted down rather than polished. Stanzas vary in length, as a rambling talker's would. Line breaks sometimes deliver dry understatement: "But when / it came time to marry, we did." The flatness is the point, because the choice was barely a choice. Her house on the sand is "protected by seawalls from the storm surge" and then the sentence spills over the stanza break into "until these last couple years when everything / got me at once." The white space is where the wall gives way.
What breaks through is memory itself: her mother's lullabies, which return like a bottle on the "high tide's windrow" with a message "written in your own hand, / in childish shaky letters." The image is lovely because the shakiness of a child learning to write and of an old person losing control of the pen is the same shakiness. She "just lie[s] here humming & wondering where I've been."
The ending refuses to become sentimental. She jokes that she isn't yet bad enough to be taken "out back & shoot[ed]," the way a farm animal might be, then offers Burns's "Flow Gently Sweet Afton," a song whose refrain asks the river not to disturb a sleeper's dream. That explains the title, though the poem never uses the word "dream" itself. Her last move is to decline to sing: "There'll be plenty of time later, when I'm gone." It is funny, brave and unsettling, and it leaves the song, like the rest of her life, half told. That is the poem's significance: it lets an ordinary life be strange, and lets death be a conversation rather than a speech.