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Dave Bonta
Three days before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, my friend L. and I get lost on a hike above a dammed-up river, too busy arguing about politics to notice that we’ve branched off onto the wrong logging road. The sun is going down. On the ridge above us, coyotes start singing. Their melismatic solos intertwine in a way that can’t be called dissonant, though Lord knows it’s nothing as simple as harmony.
no longer lost
that hole in the clouds
far upslope
barbaric yawp
you say the coyotes sound
as if they're fighting
Mayapples are coming up:
green parasols shedding
the soil as they open.
A coyote trots across the road,
looking back
over its shoulder.
Above the trembling surface
of the vernal pond,
the first warblers’ buzzy songs.
On a low mound in the woods,
two coyotes have left
overlapping turds—
like graffiti tags
made of mouse hair
and small bones.
I follow their tracks.
They diverge in an old clearcut
choked with tree-of-heaven.
Coyote makes a diary of sadness
in the mountains, deserts
and plains where he lives.
alone, and he sings from it.
At night,
even where Pig can hear,
it moves
in and across Pig/s eyes
and in pig/ears, near
where his brain
ticks: what they will do is make
meat of me
bacon and chops
a-roast-pig, and whatever else is
tasteful (Coyote
sings from it.
This is still unbroken country: granite
that buckled a million eons ago,
diorite boulders, manzanita—and coyote,
as lean and sharp as death itself.
I think of the ridge in darkness where
ponderosa pines creak like beams
of sunken ships. If you think about
a slab of slate beneath the snow,
you are glad to be in bed,
three blankets toward sleep.
It can be that simple.
A winter night in the hills allows
the luxury of plain choices,
whether to freeze or not.
Out there the bear’s brain sleeps.
A coyote cries like a victim.
The moon is a charring ember
Dying into the dark;
Off in the crouching mountains
Coyotes bark.
The stars are heavy in heaven,
Too great for the sky to hold--
What if they fell and shattered
The earth with gold?
No lights are over the mesa,
The wind is hard and wild,
I stand at the darkened window
And cry like a child.