Coyote

Autumn. The day’s last light lies down with me

in unkempt fields of coastal grass, exhausted.

This strenuous season makes far-off dogs

howl stray sounds they assume will soothe.

Late summer herons landed on my roof.

Their spread wings expose thin white chests

as if to say, embrace the change these skies bring.

Now all the scaffolds are finally down

no one re-tells our creation story. Before

someone laid the tiles of the world, people

were dust-sized seeds in mother earth’s

innumerable bellies. The first flowering things

bloomed animals, trees walked on four legs.

When the sun’s oceans dried, fish fell from the air.

When Coyote’s wild snout felt night winds

he said, I must have more. Why live in sunshine

alone and sleep when simpler creatures sleep?

I’ll convene a meeting with every Chief

from every corner of the land to see

if we cannot climb out this mud of our old habits.

But no one knew how to satisfy the god’s

yearning, though the sun agreed to dance

from one end of the globe to the other.

To make the darkness brighter Coyote

dug underneath the hills that housed starlight,

gathered sleeping brothers and sister stars

in a blanket of earth and bounced them so high

they are afraid to ever fall back on ground.

This is why some stars seem dimmer than most,

how evening got separated from daytime.

This is why dirt and clay give up such little light.

Seasons began to change then mankind germinates.

At once we gain a befuddled voice. We stop

re-inventing this first story, whatever it was, and,

with it, forget all the different possibilities of praise.

Reviews

[W.k.kortas]

Someone is some other context once referred to autumn, especially November, as "apocalyptic". I don't know if this piece is that, but there is a certain fin-de-siecle feel to this piece, and it mixies that notion with myth (especially creation myth?) seamlessly. This is wonderful, wonderful writing.