Three miles west of Sue and Gerry’s house
I found what remained of a young
coyote; how long dead, I couldn’t say,
though all the soft tissue was gone, the eye-sockets
hollow, the viscera
scraped from the crib of the bone, leaving only the glare
of spine and a tatter of hide,
bald at the forelegs and black where the mouth had become
a rueful ventriloquist’s grin.
It’s hard to walk away from such a find;
there is something about a dead thing out in the open
that draws us in, a kind of gravity
both intimate and fateful, and I went back several times
to stand there, in the queasy sway of it,
flesh of its flesh, so it seemed, yet powerless
to wish it back to life
– though that was what I wanted: like a child,
I wanted to make it well, to resurrect
the light in its face, the attention, the changing colours.
I remember I used to come home through the ash
and graphite of the woods on Fitty Road,
the shadows mauve and grey between the trees
and subtle, always shifting, so it seemed
a presence in the land was out to play.
On days when I timed it right, I walked back
in the blue hour, when the stands
of thistle in full seed were incandescent
– no other word for it, everything lit with a pale,
cold flame.
I found a sheep there once, a slur
of lanolin and rot, the fleece
yellowed and bare in patches, one eye
more or less intact, a pool
of verdigris I didn’t dare to touch,
though, up till then, I’d thought I was afraid
of nothing.
It shamed me for days, remembering how I’d lost
my nerve and run away,
guilty of something – though what I couldn’t tell –
alone in the dark and suddenly wanting my mother.
They say the dead still listen for a time
before they leave for good, the spirit
sifting away in the wind, or salting the grass
for the life of the world to come.
Maybe it’s this that decides
the new beginning, someone
coming across a field
at evening, birdsong
high in the trees, or the first dark spots
of rain in a stand of nettles: everything
shapes what it encounters, glancing touch
or intricate refusal, requiem,
or silence.
So when that day arrives
when I shall die,
carry me out of the house, unwashed and naked,
and leave me in the open, where the crows
can find me,
dogs, if there are dogs – there will be rats,
but let them eat their fill, so what they leave
can blend into the soil
more easily.
Some moisture will be lost
to heat and wind
but something more will live again
as fodder: meadow-grass
and daisies, rue
and hawthorn, all the living knots
of larvae in the scattering of flesh
and bone, birds gathering the hair
to line their nests, the last ants
busy about the mouth while something
inexact and perfect forms itself
around the last faint wisp
of vein, or tendon: something like a song,
but taking shape, implacably itself,
new breath and vision, gathered from the quiet.