Six feet is not a safe distance from a cougar, and the dreamer knows it. The poem recounts a dream in which a pair of young cougars, then a second pair with a huge adult, close in on the speaker in a mountain meadow. The speaker expects to be attacked. Instead the largest cat rears up and dances. The poem's central idea sits in its subtitle, "The Cougar Chooses to Dance". Real power, the poem suggests, is measured by what it holds back as much as by what it could do, and the speaker's fear gives way to something closer to awe.
The poem builds this change slowly, and the early stanzas read almost like a field report. The cougars come "in pairs," the cubs are "maybe four or five feet long," "mid-brown in color," and their brown muzzles tell the speaker they are young. That deduction is pure dream logic, confident and oddly precise. The same calm, measuring voice describes the first danger: a cub lunges, the speaker fires, and the bullet "missed / its head on the left side." Nothing is dramatized. Because the voice stays so level, the moment the tone changes is felt strongly.
That change begins when the speaker meets the second pair. One cat is young, but the other is "huge," with a "black-tinged" muzzle, "probably a mother." The speaker's reasoning shifts from identifying to surrendering: "I could not stop it with a pistol bullet / if it charged, so I did not shoot." The pistol, the speaker's only tool of control, is quietly abandoned. The adult cat also stands "between Uri and me," which sets up a parallel. The speaker is a parent with a child, and so is the cougar. Whether she is a threat or a guardian is left open, which keeps the tension alive.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and short lines that follow speech more than meter. Most lines begin in lowercase, as if the speaker were telling the dream aloud, still working out what happened. Line breaks do some of the frightening work. "She was six feet away. there / was no way I could escape" breaks on the word "there," so the reader hangs for a beat before hearing there is no exit. When the dance starts, the language changes. The cougar "rear[s] back upright on two feet," standing like a person, and the verbs begin to circle: "spiral and spin," "spin and swirl," "twirl and spin." The same few words keep reappearing in new orders, so the repetition turns like the dancer. The soft *s*, *sw* and *tw* sounds slow the line down. The reader is made to watch at the speaker's unhurried pace.
The most striking moment comes after the dance, when the speaker's mind reaches for another word: "'maul' is the word." The quotation marks hold the word at arm's length, as if the speaker were naming the expected ending in order to refuse it. Then the sentence breaks off: "she could have. . ." The ellipsis and the dash in "—but instead," show the speaker still taking in how close the violence was. What follows is gentle and stripped down: "she let me / watch her." The word "let" matters here. The speaker is no longer a hunter or a victim but a guest, permitted to see something. The poem ends on "before me," in the middle of the dance, with no lesson stated.
That open ending is part of what makes the poem memorable. The title calls the cougar a goddess, but the poem never explains the word. It lets the image carry it: a creature of enormous strength, beyond human weapons, using its freedom for something beautiful. The poem reverses the usual story of a human meeting a predator, where the animal is a menace or a trophy. Here the human is small, unarmed in effect, and spared. A dream gives the poem permission to be strange, but the plain, measured language makes the strangeness convincing. A reader finishes it feeling that being watched by something dangerous, and left unharmed, can be a kind of gift.