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Poetry of Issue # 60
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COYOTE IS COMING  | |||
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About Us
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COYOTE IS COMING Coyote, when you were still a god, they used to say that you created the world. Does it look unfamiliar to you now? The roads roll north past the tracts of new houses past the malls on Central Avenue where shoppers rush, cars in the parking lots, the flashings of sudden, incomprehensible light-- the coyote bitch birthed her pups in a hollow behind tall weeds. She likes this country, a fat land, rich with garbage. She hunts in the safety of darkness, in the hid- den places, kills mice one after another with a swift, stiff- legged pounce then trots home. Her tumbling pups bolt shreds of warm, regurgitated meat. These lives continue in the interstices of the world we built. Remember the dandelion, plantain, ailanthus, those who reach for the sun, rising from roots tangled in trash. I saw a cardinal, a yellow warbler, a muskrat paddling against the current of the Bronx River, I saw two raccoons lope across Pelham Parkway like strange, humpbacked cats. The geese don't migrate, they have it too good here, the gander brings his fuzzy goslings to my feet to beg for food, all the while hissing a warning. I squat on my heels to meet his wary brown eye while the goslings totter around me, peeping. I want to welcome them, I want to say the wilderness is returning in the shadow of the city, Coyote is coming. ________________________________ |
Coyote, you are the spirit of life that rises out of the weed patch, the unpredictable sur- vivor. In the West, your children were hunted mercilessly; chased with hounds, poisoned with strychnine, poisoned with cyanide, poisoned with 1080, shot, snared, trapped, run down by snowmobile, muzzled with barbed wire, skinned, nailed to the wail. Over slow years, some drifted north to Canada, roamed eastward, following the good pickings, learned to live in the shadow of suburbs, interbred with Cana- dian wolves. Some wandered down through New England into New York State. One was seen recently in Westchester, not forty minutes by car from Manhattan. Coyote, I call on you, spirit of wilderness that calls to the wild in us. You who run on the ridge with wind-ruffled fur, the hills are stamped with your voice. You are the joker, the wild card, trickster. You who laugh at traps, come stealthy one, teach us to dig under fences, to sing in the moonlight, let us remember that we, too, are animal, to know our own dangerous beauty, our lives entwined with all of those others, flesh in our hungers, full in our joys, may we be wise, and when we die may our bones be food for those who will follow. Coyote is coming. Alison Koffler ________________________________ |
COYOTE I saw you born of fog, playing with your brother on the colonial carriage path, Surrounding glacial pastures, in northern New Jersey. Your pack barked and wailed, when the fire horn screamed, As I sat at my campfire on haunted Schunemunk Mountain. I followed your paw prints in December snows of Black Rock Forest. Coyote, suckle your pups at summer filled teats Breathing poetry under dark mountain laurels. A truck murdered you. I stopped at your majestic torso-- a yelp of rich blood like a red vine from your open maw. Dark blonde fur caressed by Algonquin and Lenape ghosts, beckoned me to halt my car. I could not leave you to be spread into ruin by oblivion's emissaries. I grasped back legs, and pulled your sleeping body from damp and dumb pavement-- the sacrifical altar of commerce. Petroleum death barges sailed by. I dragged you, like a sack of wet sand; a fallen rebel against an urban incursion. The humid day called witness clouds for ghosts to clean your blood with hail and cool July rain. They chased you down in Central Park. It took days but they found you: cast a net over your feral hide, stabbed you with needles, and made your green fire smolder and smoke like addicts in alleyways, on stoops, and Victorian tenements. They captured you, ensnared you with poisoned meat and rifle dirges like bold Grey Wolf and Mountain Lion. Their metal traps mock your fangs, chew your fur, flesh, and muscle. People turn on their own packs-they kill what they do not comprehend. Coyote deity, your rut will be written in soil tales; on lichen parchment; spring fog, summer oak stands, when your clan is gone. Yet, who shall write of the human drama of blood: Babies born of starving mothers and warfare fathers; skeleton houses and twisted automobiles? Humans prepare for war and make babies. They slaughter the forest, and whelp babies. They poison the water, and drop babies. They pave over farmland and starve children. Your spirit walks in summer-mad marshland, searching for your mate and pups, Crossing roads in bog mists, and scavenging like humans. Robert Milby ____________________________ |