Coyote
Sniffing around my future
where my body crouched broiling beneath a rock,
you pawed backwards over six moonrises
to stop my future by halting my past
and emerged from crackling yellow roadside grasses
like instant Coyote Ramen mix of hot air and weed.
You stuck your beige snout in my face and dug paws
implacably into sand like a live Park closure sign
as if you were Disney and stood and stood still.
But when I didn’t obey, you turned into a shadow
crossing the pump beneath the water tower.
Dug from dirt, lifted in the arms of a desert rescue
’coptered over the moon to an emergency hospital bed
and pumped with a rainbow of fluids, I woke mesmerized
by your furry flesh and blood proof
of Whitman’s great astronomer moment.
Will you leave a hot white fire in a thatch-frame hut—
all native mythology, prairie sun dances, great
Crazy Horse bios and Chumash sky paintings
bursting into flames? You, comet-riding Coyote?
I’ll search blue desert night for you, my beloved,
past craggy-limbed chollas whitened in moon.
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