National Poetry Month--Three O’Clock in the Morning, Alone

I have written a sequence of Coyote poems, imagining the trickster Coyote manifesting as an avatar in human form. In these poems, I see Coyote as the archetype of all the "bad boys" of literature, film, and television--Bluebeard or the Beast in fairy tales, Heathcliff, Marc Antony, Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've always been secretly drawn to these dark antiheroes, and judging by the sheer number of bad boys in fairy tales, literature, movies, and television, so are many others.

The poems I've written about Coyote have been some of my most popular poems. I even have a whole group of female fans in the UK just for the Coyote poems. So I thought I would post a Coyote poem each day for the next ten days in sequence, sort of a serialized chapbook of Coyote poems. Here is the first.

THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, ALONE

Coyote wails in the far field

beside his woods.

He runs yelping,

baying among the trees,

hot on your trail

across farms and highways,

down city streets to prowl

outside your triple-locked doors.

Coyote could splinter

that wood, shatter

your windows, plunge

into your life, drag you

to his den.

He will be civilized instead,

phone you in the morning, pretend

he has left a book behind.

Coyote moves back

into his woods, voice

fading.

He dials your number

now, growls into your sleepy ear.

Published in Heart’s Migration (Tia Chucha Press, 2009)