On the Last Day of Coyote’s Estrus
@ Green Mountains National Forest
2/15/21, 3:44 pm EST, 12 ° F
of course the shepherd wants
to writhe around on it working
into shaft
& pore the
instant funk
I growl me
first knees
to the snow pack
eyes cradling
three lengths of
colorless winter scat
laid a thumbwidth from
one broad hole scalded
sulphurous in the February
shave ice & just
there:
pinkish blur
of her blood
a pinch wicked
crystalline
everything
that comes at me
does its coming
as inkling nearly
calibratable
it’s three weeks
since Kelly curved herself
beside the body
already begun
to seek the kitchen’s
ambient temp
she shutting shy
his one eye still
half-lidded
the better
to hear
each.
full.
stop.
& one week
since the tracer
pushed into
Katie’s frail
vein lighting up
the dread
in how many
tell me please
how very many cells—
& last night
I was asked to
visualize the cervix
of a stranger
that it might
ripen by morning
as does
the reluctant
pear
it’s a minute
since I bled
bred
was hollowed
flooded
with what
will make coyote
squat again dab
smack at path’s center
where the right nose
will home soonest
the shrivening
woods will whet us
tonight seeming multiply
to throat & tongue much
many more than
there are
rumps that lock
tonight my thoughtless
foot will rove
against the cool sheet
will graze
yours will
pin its
arch
here
The Vow
Groggily he pronounced me the keeper
of the can. It fell to me as well to receive
from his muddy grip each plum-pink crawler,
doubling it onto the jagged barb,
two bulges where the hook sunk in.
His red canvas chair, his hands, miniatures
of my own, and his happy little fusses,
noting every twitch of the tremulous line.
Across the pond, hundreds of geese practiced
stillness, incurious about our doings
on the narrow causeway. The sky was
perhaps hushed, a sly dawn, enormous,
unspectacular, as some skies tend to be.
It has been twenty years after all.
In the leafless air, our voices were
what we heard, each echoing the other’s
vow to come back here and do this again
and again. We must have brought along
a bucket just in case, big enough to haul
the hold he had in mind, sound enough
to store every scrap I cannot now recall.
But for this: the rambunctious roiling
of mutual alarm as the geese barked,
loping across the water toward us, lifting off
in ruffles, a mass unfurling over our heads,
their air on our faces upturned, their legs
dangling down, their black webbed feet,
like sudden silly afterthoughts. The pond
would have settled quickly, as ponds do,
as ponds will do.
Header photo by My Generations Art, courtesy Shutterstock.