Coyote droppings are not what most poets would choose to start with, and the poem doesn't pretend otherwise. Its first stanza plants the speaker on "a low mound in the woods" and shows us exactly what is there: "overlapping turds." The surprise comes in the second stanza, where the droppings become "graffiti tags / made of mouse hair / and small bones." The title, "Wildstyle," then falls into place. In graffiti, wildstyle is the dense, interlocking lettering that looks like pure tangle to outsiders and reads as a signature to those who know the code. The poem proposes that the woods have their own writers, and that a patient walker might learn to read them.
The pun in the title does a lot of work. "Wild" is the ordinary word for what the coyotes are, and "style" suggests that their marks have a manner, even a flair. The comparison also holds up on practical grounds. Judging by the poem's own picture, the coyotes have left their marks one on top of the other, as rival taggers do, and a tag is a claim: *I was here, this is mine.* Neither the poem nor the comparison needs to say more.
The form is plain. There are three tercets of short, unrhymed lines in free verse, and the sound is quiet and matter-of-fact. The syntax is the main trick. The first stanza is a single sentence that stops on a dash after "turds," holding the reader for a beat before the simile arrives. "Have left" hangs at the end of its line, so even the break between lines mimics something dropped and abandoned. The word choice is blunt, too. "Turds" is a deliberately unglamorous choice, and it keeps the poem from sounding like a hushed nature lecture. There is a little humor in it, and the humor is what lets the comparison land.
The imagery is concrete and a bit grisly. The "tags" are made of "mouse hair / and small bones," so the message is also a record of a meal, and the writing is built from what the writer ate. Real graffiti is gritty too, and the poem's materials match that grit: hair, bone, dirt. The sounds support this. The hard stops in "tags" and "tracks" link the two words, since both are marks left behind. The vowels in "mound," "mouse" and "bones" are heavy and rounded, like the objects themselves.
In the last stanza the speaker moves from looking to following: "I follow their tracks." Reading has become tracking, and the speaker is now a kind of literate visitor in the animals' territory. But the tracks "diverge." The overlap of the first stanza, two animals marking the same spot, gives way to separation, and the writers go their own ways. The setting matters here. An "old clearcut / choked with tree-of-heaven" is a damaged landscape, cleared by people and then overrun by a tree whose name sounds far grander than its behavior. The poem doesn't comment, but the imagery suggests that these coyotes live in scarred, second-hand ground, not untouched wilderness. Graffiti also tends to flourish in neglected, abandoned places, so the clearcut quietly echoes the urban comparison.
The poem stops on "tree-of-heaven" without a moral or a summing up. The speaker reaches a fork, and so do we, and the poem leaves us standing there.
What makes it worth reading is how it reverses a familiar habit. Poems usually borrow images from nature to explain human feelings. Here a human, urban, even rebellious art form is borrowed to explain what an animal does, and the result makes the animal seem more intelligent, not less. The poem also respects the reader's attention. In twelve short lines it shows how seeing something familiar in a new way can change a small, rather disgusting object into a text, and a walk in the woods into an act of reading.