Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and the creatures of the title appear only as a pronoun. "Coyotes" gives the poem its subject, and then "they" carries on as if we already know them. The effect is of someone mid-thought, standing outside at dusk and half-talking to a companion. We are dropped into the scene with no introduction, which suits a sound that arrives out of the dark without warning.
The first couplet is all place and habit: "cold to the west where / they like to sit and wail." The cold is a direction as much as a temperature, as if the west were a region made of chill. The verbs are the surprise. "Sit" is a faintly domestic, almost dog-like word, and "wail" is the opposite, the loudest and most grief-laden verb available. Putting them side by side, with "like to" in between, turns the howling into a pastime. The coyotes are not being tortured by anything. They are simply doing what they enjoy, and the speaker has noticed.
That is why the next couplet is so interesting: "like no grief / in any sea." The word "like" has already appeared once, meaning "enjoy," and now it returns meaning "resembling." The poem plays on both senses. The wail sounds like grief, which is the first thing most listeners would say, but the poem says it is like *no* grief. This reads as a refusal of the easy comparison. Whatever the coyotes are doing, it is not mourning. The sea is an unexpected choice of place for grief. It suggests sorrow on the largest possible scale, deep and unending, and the poem sets even that aside. The coyote's cry may be vast in sound, but it doesn't come from that kind of sadness. Because the lines break after "grief" and again after "sea," each short phrase gets a moment to settle before the next arrives.
The final couplet turns from the huge to the tiny: "or the wonderful ears / of our little dog." The little word "or" is a hinge, and it can be read in more than one way. It may extend the comparison, so that the wail is also unlike the dog's ears. Or it may simply offer a second thing the speaker's attention lands on, the dog's reaction to the sound. I read it mainly as the latter, since a dog's ears are what we watch when a distant howl starts. But the ambiguity is part of the pleasure, because the poem never fully commits to one logic. The word "our" is the only place a human household enters. It brings us suddenly indoors, to a pet and a shared life, and that makes the coyotes' wildness feel closer and stranger at once.
"Wonderful" is the emotional center of the poem. It is a plain, almost childlike word, and it does exactly what it says, since it contains "wonder." Sound reinforces the link. "West," "where," "wail" and "wonderful" all begin with the same breathy w, so the poem's vowels and consonants seem to carry the long, rising note of a howl through to the last couplet. The wail and the wonder are stitched together by sound before the poem ever says they belong together.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is loose and speech-like, with lines of roughly three to six syllables. The poem doesn't push toward a punchline. The last line, "of our little dog," ends on a soft, one-syllable word, so the poem drifts to a close.
What makes it significant is its small act of correction. It takes one of the most familiar clichés in nature writing, the lonely, sorrowful howl, and quietly sets it aside. In its place, the poem offers attention: to cold air, to animals enjoying themselves, and to the ears of a dog that listens. Wonder, it suggests, is not found in grand emotional comparisons but in noticing exactly what is in front of us, however small.