Coyote

          Canis latrans lestes

Obelus stung on the wind-scribbled dark, they hatch,
yipping and hallooing, throats pinked on a tether
of sky—cry, petty as kings, from the yucca steppe.
Firs bow, shabby in the tonsured wood. Winter’s stole 
glown moonless over everything. You read no grief,
no flint of jaundiced eye nor toothy slaver, no
landform salvaged of the polestar, no wittering
of sagebrush, witless, in the void beyond this room
where you’re lying, steeped in the mistranslatable
nights of the pack—which bays now, brooding on that carcass
of the wonderstruck doe, roadside, its frozen seeps;
(no) which keens over asphalt sprawls on the landshard;
which tongues (no) for the wink of a bile duct, pressing
the choleric fact of you. Make answer, O spleen.
Lend us your script, a Merovingian flourish—
make caytive the yowl, the frost-curlicued window.