I hate following you.  You’re straight
and long, boundless, impossible.

Looking at you,
I feel inadequate. Looking at you,
I never know where to begin.

On this, the first day of the newest year,
like baggage never lost, another missed
performance.  It follows me around here -
that stench of last week, of procrasti-
nation, the falling off of lines, flip charts,
of disappointed agendas, valets,
cabbies, elevator riders.  An art,
they say, of keeping up with yesterdays.
May auld remembrance be forgot, never
brought to mind and all the things I should have
done not be posted online.  Whatever.
Even undone is some done.  A weak salve
for the guilty is still a band-aid fix
stopping the sound of the clock’s blasted ticks.

Some Czech had told him that each of the patrol dogs wore a sign that said Hund.  Why? Said the Czechs, and the Germans said, Because that is a hund.  –“Away From Her,” Alice Munro

When the singular coyote

Photo: Mav/Wiki

with the stripped tail
started roaming the hill
behind the schoolyard
and beside the schoolyard
I warned the children.

They wanted to know why
she was alone,
if it was a she,
and where were her friends,
what did she eat,
where did she come from,
why did she live there
and where did her tail go?

We phoned the city
and listened to a recording
about five minutes long
telling us this is nature
and not to be worried
cover our garbage
and close the fence.

That they can’t do anything
and even if they could
it wouldn’t last
so be happy with that.

We left them a message
saying the kids are in danger
and people have to work
we can’t be happy with that.

I told the kids to walk home
around the playground
a different way
to stay together
to run and yell
to act bigger
not to look her in the eyes
should she come to them.

A coyote is not a dog, I said,
even though she smiles at you
she’ll take what she can get
because she is hungry
and that is her nature
a coyote is a wild thing
and cannot be tamed.

I don’t know why I
simply don’t believe it
leaving meat outside
my door for her
after everyone’s in bed.

There’s finality in a broken thing,
to the attic or to the trash.

What to do with an erratic thing?
Counter, closet, cupboard, smash.

Pomegranate blood on the cutting board
stain the wood, my fingers,
everything but the knife.

Past histories spill out
in six lines while survivors are dug
from the canals below.

Here, a wounded soldier, and here,
a severed pirate’s eye gaping
at Persephone in her catacomb.

Teeth slip on the gelatin of the season,
crunching the core of winter
and tasting the sour months left behind.

Stories without endings

Photo: Chin tin tin/Wiki

aren’t a moral lesson
in imagination.

Like waffles served
without chicken –

I’ve never tried them,
so I wouldn’t know
what I was missing

to begin with.

Who expects proof when all of nature shouts
the truth?  It is only you

and you and they
that talk of the sudden beingness
of yesterday

like it just appeared; a satin lady
in a box, one to leer upon
while the man

in tails and swift hands looks
away.  You were never
supposed to see Him anyway.

When I checked the obituaries,
you weren’t dead yet.

Instead I checked the hooka joints
and found you with the poets.

Does the smoke around your head
mean disillusionment
or just another winter?

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the
end;
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge, and urge, and urge;
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—always substance and increase,
always sex;
Always a knit of identity—always distinction—always a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail—learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is
so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entreated, braced in
the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery, here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my Soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my Soul.