Walk

The kill was accidental the coyotes did not want the meat the meat didn’t want to be downed that day the rain charged the air with negative ions we all felt great & walked, garnet crystals flanked the washed-up creek wind-rush, you know that feeling of no surveillance? Curious objects fall—a purple leaf or walnut in its citron husk, we peeled one bare down to its tannic heart with 911 a county away, the sky a blank crow caw.

It’s not as though the coyotes buttoned up their coyote suits that morning plotting to leave a being childless. Whether fowl or furred the mothers left their hymnals in their caves that day the same as us—it’s not unusual, in fall, to come across vermillion grasses in the rough part of the field path, but maybe that’s why the coyotes fled the scene so fast: an eerie fear the meat belonged to family, but which one?

Can it be said that one gets used to either being stalked or stalking? Having had no recent predators, the coyotes must have felt free walking the beat—you know that feeling of no surveillance? When all the woods are yours to eat, don’t trespass signs are landscape. After all, we’d been so used to trying not to gain attention, our sheer movement past the cattails may have startled the coyotes before the feast, our footsteps sounding

numerous as rain & with winter on fall’s heels one might believe each droplet held an icicle or spectacle for bearing witness to what pack in nature lay our meat to waste. Rain accents cadmium vine strung down to chartreuse feather—no lens does justice. That’s why we took the walk, while shivering, & saw this meat arrested, fresh, & glittering as if to plead a silent testament: Aren’t you my kin? Whoever once walked aimless

in these woods now walks awake with me in death.