COYOTE

He watches

from the edge of the hillside, where the land

turns into town. Like a dog, but not,

in the first light

and the quiet. If I move again

he’ll turn to nothing.

But he knows too much,

despite my silence, sees me and hears me,

his gaunt head, his thin legs,

his entire body aimed in my direction, but without

seeming to shift, first motionless,

and then motionless again. His ears

take me in, this cool morning,

drought lingering long after the season

should have turned. What else should I be

doing now? I have a day

ahead of me, and I am nearly late. The roofers

are starting their own efforts,

from far off the scent of tar and the wheezy rumble

of melting roof-stuff. A human voice

reaches this far, and a responding laugh.

On the hill the dry rye and oat weeds are

all around, but when the coyote passes

through them he leaves

no parting. In no haste,

he is there, and then there, and when he is gone

completely he surely must be

invisible, watching from a shadow where

there is only blank sun.

Why do I feel

such quiet joy? I approach

his place and stand on the ridge,

no sign of him,

except a lapse in the dry grasses where during

the night he must have rested, he

rolled and slept,

here where the weeds are already

shifting, their lifeless stems

just now closing to

haphazard perfection.

 

EGRET

       This is where the day

       meets night, in this

       dark eye, this single-point

       decimal, and in

       this wet talon, lifted and

       once again secreted from light,

       in this reflection

       stretching up to touch

       the knife he has grown out of his

       body. When this mathematician

       looks at you he takes you up

       in his reckoning as

       no loving creature ever could,

       seeing how little you have to offer, and seeing

       how easy you would be to subtract.

       He knows enough of how this all began,

       how the muddy gravel at the bottom

       of the watercourse tastes

       of the first zero,

       and he knows his}

       stalking vigil,

       alive to the fingerlings

       in the opaque and brackish

       boundary between what lives

       and what will never

       take breath. His beak

       comes up empty.

       It slices down again—

       empty once more.

       Time and calendars,

       doubt and investigation,

       dissolve. He knows

       what stirs the fugitive

       to flee, to dart from murk|

       to scissoring, swallowed

       conclusion—and from time

       to time escape,

       splashing free. So that it starts anew,

       yet again, the account

       continuing, every instant an end.

Michael Cadnum has published nearly forty books. His new collection of poems, The Promised Rain, is in private circulation. He lives in Albany, California.

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Published in the April 14, 2017 issue: View Contents

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