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Pine Row Issue No. 7 Summer 2023 - Featured Poet
Hibernation
First it’s a month, then another
four. I begin to lose things: yesterday’s
mail, the trail out of the woods. Whenever
I can, I slip free from the talking—
oh, how I used to love the talking—but now,
word then word costs so much—the picking of them,
the parting of them. Do I mean whisper
or sliver? Or silver or maybe slipper, maybe bedtime
slipper. Someone asks, Mom, are you all right?
And it’s hard to remember
what I don’t remember. Nights
have never brought such sweet,
chocolate dark. Once I was afraid
of the busy night-mind, nightmares
crackling inside my eyes. But now
sleep is a plunge
into the numb dream, the one where
I am deeply sleeping. My body
brings me. She is shambling and rank,
but not, or not exactly, a bear.
Though who else can dig her way
down dirt into burrow, who else
can lift my dreaming self, by the nape,
by the mouthful? Carry
the huge weight of me—
fetally swinging, fatally singing—
deeper and deeper
to sleep.
About this poem: as shared by the poet
About this poem: as shared by the poet
Sometime in the second Covid spring, I began to notice a certain disorientation in myself. Or do I mean depression? Anyway, I lost things, forgot things, broke things at an unusual rate even for a woman long famed for clumsiness. One morning I realised that every night for a week I had dreamed myself asleep and dreaming. This seemed so odd that I decided to see if it would make a poem, and Hibernation is the result.
Gail DiMaggio’s first book, Woman Prime, was selected by Jericho Brown for the 2018 Permafrost Poetry Prize and published by Alaska University Press. Her work has appeared recently in The Ekphrastic Review, The Whiskey Island, and Raw Arts Review where her poem “We Look into Fire” was a runner up for the Mirabai Prize. In 2022, five of her poems received that year's Passager Poetry Prize. Her upcoming poetry collection, What She Made of It, will be published in early 2024 by Pine Row Press.
She resides in Concord, NH.
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