crossing the street alongside five coyotes
a pack or middling clan
of half dog devils
chests bony
a chorus of panting
knowing open mouth smiles
cheap blankets of fur
and black spotted lips
hunched canine shoulders
swaying gypsy hips
they smell like wet desert
of both the hunt and the huddle
of frozen winter bushes
and howling monsoon summers
of our encroachment
and their struggle
as development snares
new square acres as its own
Now cat alley and dog street
will be coyote clan home
So I demurely defer
and let this nobility pass
but just one pilgrim
catches me in their glance
and across that midnight
black asphalt expanse
he speaks in laughing mute
tongue wagging silent salute
“Move mortal,
We beggar princes are on the move.”
I wrote this poem intially sometime in about 2003 or 2004. I was living with a friend on the outskirts of Phoenix, where the shore of the desert is crashed upon by the rising tide of condos and suburbia. At night, rattlesnakes and javelena and coyotes would invade the neighborhood. Walking back from some misdemeanor or another, I encounter a pack of coyotes in the neighborhood.
This poem sat in its primeviel form in a notebook from that time and wasn’t unearthed until about 2011 when I started read it at several open mics and events. I publish it here for the first time for two reasons- one, so that it has a permanent form somewhere. Two, because my handwriting from the time is so atrocious that the poem has changed frequently. This is the version I like the most.
