Veering down the track like a girl veering down a cobbled street<br />in the meat-packing district,<br />high heels from the night before, black shawl of black-tipped hairs...<br /><br />Paul Muldoon: So this is a poem called The Coyote, or The Coyote, depending on where you are brought up, and it has do with a coyote I came across--saw--one evening in Vermont. And my dog didn't seem to notice the coyote, and that's really at the core of this poem--trying to make sense of that moment. I mentioned the game of marbles, keepsies, the marbles weren't kept. <br /> <br />The Coyote <br />Veering down the track like a girl veering down a cobbled street <br />in the meat-packing district, <br />high heels from the night before, black shawl of black-tipped hairs, <br /> <br />steering clear of that fluorescent ring <br />spray-painted on an even stretch of blacktop <br />like a ring in which we might once have played keepsies, <br /> <br />veering down the track without the slightest acknowledgement from Angus, <br />the dog lying in a heap on our porch <br />like a heap of clothes lying beside a bed, <br /> <br />Angus who had himself been found wandering by the highway <br />somewhere on the far side of Lake Champlain, <br />slubber-furred, slammerkin, backbone showing through, <br />and, though we didn't know it when we brought him home, <br />blind in one eye, the right one, <br />the one between him and the coyote, <br />the cloudy, flaw-fleckered marble of that eye <br />now turning on you and me, <br />taking in the spray-painted ring where you and I knuckle down. <br /> <br />Recorded on: Jan 30, 2008
