Not an elegy

In the new year I keep hearing coyotes when I try to sleep.

Focused in packs and shrill as hags in the woods

around my parents’ land,

they’re eating family dogs these barer months.

Send up a bitch in heat, lure out the Springer Spaniel, etc.

Our own cattle dog faced this temptation a week ago,

but my father caught him before the whimpering

drew him like a line through the fence.

He’s growling tonight, arching his hair,

and confronting the black door. I’m shivering

in a warm house. I think I’ve caught the flu;

my mind feels raving.

It’s questioning things like purpose,

why I have not yet purchased a warmer coat

for the four remaining cold months of Oregon.

Is there an animal outside? The thermometer

in my mother’s drawer is empty of mercury.

Did I just not see that? Did it drip into my mouth

while I researched symptoms online?

The dog is still growling. A man walked across two porches

near here the week before Christmas. At night,

it was insisted.

The neighbors have locked all their gates,

and I suddenly achieve perspective: the dog’s eye droops,

even my hair quivers with ache. I’m not writing an elegy.

I’m not even sure this is a poem.

Postscript:

“Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.