When I was 19, I spent a night naked

in the bed of the model for the tall man in

Cuckoo’s Nest—smart, fierce,

triathlete, 6'6", sweet,

protective and affectionate.

My body had been broken into, once, with my

shy consent, by his friend, the model for the

Cuckoo hero, painter from Kentucky who’d played

football for Stanford—Samurai dervish,

his pencil self-portraits were savage, he would draw

as we talked and drank coffee, he was living in his car—

it never occurred to me that he was married—

today I saw he looked not unlike

the way my beloved looked before

the cancer—so strong so solid he once

jumped into the chute beside a thousand-pound heifer

whose horn was stuck, a living shofar

he eased free and clambered back out,

the only Jewish cattle-breeder in New Hampshire.

And my red-haired blood-root deflowerer had left

the country the next day, to sit

sesshin in Japan for a year, and my darling

is going to have to enter the earth

when the cancer has eaten him to death—that once

most beautiful body. There, I’m a little

calmer. And I know what I need to do,

put on Casals unaccompanied—

and dance—unaccompanied—and groan, with him.

Joined Ballad

(on seeing a photograph in 1978 of Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John Paul II)

I’d been raised to believe that a man could say

if a woman could be a priest or not,

could make her own choices or not.

I had not thought

whether a pope could be cute or not.

I knew he’d been a fighter in the Polish

Resistance, and saw that he had been gorgeous,

and I’d heard he was a friend of Milosz.

Our thoughts have their own free life, I thought.

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate

clapper at the center of a bell.

It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a

halo of silver seaweed, the hair

swaying in the dark and the heat, and at night,

when his eyes sleep, it stands up

in praise of God.

Snap Pants Off Like

As they step toward the court—they are 6'4",

6'6", 6'9"—

their height in relation to me is like the height

of a parent in relation to a six-year-old child, and when they

snap their warm-ups off like that,

I jump, though I was not shucked like that,

the ritual was I undressed myself

alone in her room—the bottom half.

Did I ever see anything

change as fast as their pants? Her face? I think

I never caught the moment of the change.

I have sat by a tulip, to see it turn,

on its green neck, toward the window—watched

the back of the mayfly

split as the fresh

imago humps up, spine first

and draws itself out. And the instant of sunrise—

at the center of the glow, a drop of fire casts

forth one strand

of its fur. And before first light,

in the dark, you can see—Sie kommt!— a tip

of the rising, waning crescent, one horn