Tom I’ve a question and all I have is a question.
There are lots of coyotes near this old house you lived in.
I didn’t expect them here in the green Northeast.
Figured them things of rocks and the high sierras.
There goes another one bounding for the bushes.
First time, I thought: that’s a dog acting really strangely.
But it didn’t turn back for approval or get distracted
by an insignificant thing, as a dog will tend to.
No it was gone by now, it had made me nervous.
They’re the size of a family dog but they’re on their own.
Folks round here reassure me there’s no danger
unless you attack their cubs so I’ll shelve my plan
to attack their cubs, chrissakes. Tom, Tom,
apologies, I have loved my time in your house.
Last night at dinner we heard a siren wailing
off in the town and all of them started howling,
all the coyotes for miles around in the bushes
aghast, alerting their young, alarming their old,
rising and heightening, matching its pitch and power,
one near the blue spinning light in its thrall, uniquely
bound by this unpredicted visitation.
Then after the siren faded they packed it in.
What do they think that is, that demands of them
and gets of them their love or their terror or both?
What do we poets do when we know it’s nothing?
Not for them or against them or about them.
Tom, I had to be here to ask that question.
I expect I’ll have to be gone before you answer.
“Coyotes by the Eliot House,” by Glyn Maxwell
Source: News Flash Trending
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