The Dream
After “Dream” (1945), by Marc Chagall

I’m done with “love”—I think I’ll take a nap,
or that, at least, is what I’d told myself,
but then I fell into the deepest sleep
and dreamed you there. I was beside myself
with joy—how to say? … Oh, floating on air—
as if we two dwelled within a miracle—
wherein I visioned all that I hold dear,
the city, the Seine, Paris!, her Eiffel
Tower, that azure sky, the full moon a kind
of halo holding us as you held me,
plus your bouquet—cottage roses, lupines,
what else? I heard a fiddler’s tunes, the beat
of drums? a dancer’s clogs? or horses’ hooves?
Oh Love, my heart it was, all woke for you!

—Mary Elder Jacobsen

Mary Elder Jacobsen’s poetry has appeared in storySouth, Cold Mountain Review, Four Way Review, One, Green Mountains Review online, and elsewhere, including Poetry Daily and the anthology Healing the Divide (ed. by James Crews). A recent winner of the Lyric Memorial Prize and a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Residency, she lives in North Calais, Vermont, where she works as an editor, a sometimes illustrator, and a Co-organizer of Words Out Loud, an annual reading series held at an unplugged 1823 meeting house.