Clade Song 5

Coyotes

Set the dark to hushing.
Beyond the silence, their muzzles.

In the year of long pollen
where aggression sinks its crusts and clouds return

to flesh horizon, we come undone indoors.
Canines thread through this mortared light

imposing their congested howls.
We hear their blades and hollows from the bottom

of the night. Wings unfurl from branches.
Feathers find their angles.

Next, the claws and gullies, the valley feeding.
Wind moves without good reason.

Listening through the wall,
we’ve knuckled back to silence.

Lauren Camp is the author of two collections, most recently The Dailiness, winner of the National Federation of Press Women 2014 Poetry Book Prize and a World Literature Today “Editor’s Pick.” Her third book, One Hundred Hungers, was selected by David Wojahn for the Dorset Prize, and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She won The Más Tequila Review Margaret Randall Poetry Prize and the 2012 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Linebreak, Redivider, The Laurel Review, Nimrod and other journals. She hosts “Audio Saucepan,” a global music/poetry program on Santa Fe Public Radio. www.laurencamp.com.