Two animals never meet in Toby Olson's "Coyote," yet one of them changes the other's night. Far off in "mountains, deserts / and plains," Coyote keeps "a diary of sadness" and sings from it. Pig, shut in a barnyard, overhears. What reaches him is less Coyote's grief than a message about his own future, and that is the poem's central idea. A feeling sent out with no listener in mind can land in someone else and turn into their private dread.
The opening image is odd and precise. A diary is written, silent and secret, while a song is aimed at the open air. By saying Coyote "sings from" his diary, as if reading aloud from a page, Olson makes loneliness both something kept and something that leaks. Coyote is "alone" and has no audience, but the night carries the song anyway.
Once the song reaches Pig, the poem gets physical. The sadness "moves / in and across Pig's eyes," then into his ears, "near / where his brain / ticks." The line breaks do the work here. "Ticks" sits alone on its line, and it suggests both a clock and a countdown. Pig's mind has been running a quiet timer all along, and the song only makes it audible.
Pig's thought then arrives with no quotation marks, slipping into the narration: "what they will do is make / meat of me." The verb "make" is the cruelest choice. A living animal becomes a product, and the list that follows reads like a menu: "bacon and chops / a-roast-pig." The hyphens weld three words into one dish, so Pig's whole identity shrinks to a single item on a plate. Then comes "whatever else is / tasteful." The word is polite, almost dinner-party language, and it chills the list because it hints at a pun, since "tasteful" can mean both "in good taste" and simply "tasty." The trailing "whatever else" suggests an appetite with no limit. Notice also who "they" are. They are never named, and they sit just outside the poem like the farmers outside the fence.
The poem is framed by a repeated pattern. Coyote lives "alone" in huge open country, and Pig hears the song "alone, in the barnyard / where he lives." The two settings mirror each other and differ in scale: mountains, deserts and plains against one enclosed yard. Both animals are lonely, but Coyote's loneliness is wide and free, while Pig's is walled in and comes with a death sentence. The last word, "lives," becomes quietly ironic, because Pig has just imagined how little of that living is left.
The form fits the subject. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, only short, hushed fragments like "At night," and "it moves," which slow the reading as if the poem were itself listening. The phrase "sings from it" appears twice and works like a refrain, tying the first half to the second. In the version given here, the punctuation is rough. Slashes stand where apostrophes would be ("Pig/s," "pig/ears"), and a full stop falls mid-sentence after "lives." Those look more like transcription accidents than choices, so I would not lean on them. The parenthesis that opens at "(Coyote" and is never closed is another matter. It may be a slip, but it suits the poem, since it leaves the song hanging open and the end circling back to the beginning.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without moralizing. The capitalized names, Coyote and Pig, give the animals the plain, representative feel of a fable, yet no lesson is announced. Instead the poem raises an uncomfortable question. Did Coyote's song give Pig a new fear, or only a voice for one he already carried? The ticking brain suggests the second. If so, the poem is about how any song, poem or story can work. It doesn't hand us its maker's feelings. It finds whatever we were already afraid of and makes us hear it.