that he quickly hews away. Something for me to keep,

he says, or whispers, my own voice hissed away

into the wind’s dull soughing of leaves.

And if I too had felt my head shoved

against shagged wood planks, scrubbed blood

from my thighs, or picked splinters

from my cheeks—? I could more than picture it,

my own violation making pain the place

our bodies might meet.

The soft give of my breasts,

my rounded belly: these I offered up as gifts

to you, as if such frailty was what we’d share.

And when this failed to move you, whether

out of disgust or fear, I hardened myself to pure

muscle, starved away each craving till I pared

my way to a sleek essential: like you,

thin-hipped, raw-boned, indelible

to desire, and in that way, unassailable.

No. It wasn’t our bodies but the word

you hated, rape’s crude distinctions

in which, except you confessed, you’d be seen

only as perpetrator, darkest sense in which

this word is harnessed to your sex.

Confess: another verb bound equally to both

criminal and victim, its barb attached to any

body, but lodged deepest in the wounds

of those you once dismissed to me as weakest.

For years, you wanted something masculine,

exclusive: terms no woman could lay claim to

or encompass within her experience.

Could never use to define you, who wouldn’t live

with a language only I should know.

Out of the ship’s hold they dug horses, hounds:

throats cut, buried to honor the king for whom

they hunted. Their bodies, like his own,

slashed and overmuscled—

Only the slender mound

of bones by his head now crowns him: shimmer

of blue, green, and gold eyes dappling his neck.

A peacock, sign he conquered worlds the kirk’s

old chaplain, whose fields once housed him, never

saw. King of Norway, Egypt, India, his ancient

fist still clutches a brittle goblet saffron-

stained with the shape of a lion, its bloody yawn

cracked. A sovereign’s glass skin transcending

flesh, time, and distance: his bones displayed in urns

turning him both mythic and familiar.

Two weeks, you messaged me. Maybe four.

Sudden November snows: freak storm

outside my window where light irradiates

each flake. The cancer returned not to your kidneys

but lungs. Forty-five years old: the same age

your father died. Nature repeats itself, you worried,

the oncologists screwing their metal crown

of gamma knifepoints into your brow, piercing

your scalp into a halo of wounds. You frown

for the photo your oldest friends, piecing

a life together, will later ponder: your face

iodined, bloated, as if your skull harbored

our grief, along with a parent’s heritable illness.

Your body: was it ever yours alone?

In myths, we call it love. Call it desire

to soften the god who finds a boy, leads him

far from home, claps a cup in his hand, and demands

Bend to my will, child, you’ll be adored—