"The Coyote" by Alan Feldman

If you stripped a dog of its social eagerness,

gave it a loping indifference to human presence

and starved it, you’d have a coyote,

stalking like a shadow among the garbage cans

at the top of Pearl Street, near the Fine Arts Work Center.

We’re heading back to our car through a fine mist,

the streetlights haloing amid the black trees,

and we stop, watching him appear and disappear

gaunt as a Giacometti. He’s nothing

like a dog bounding into the street.

Does he care if this is a street?-or just a hard place

under his paws. Ever since childhood

I’ve tried to be alert to what people are up to,

but why not see the coyote’s point of view?-

how he prefers to ignore them,

following his own track through the darkness.

"The Coyote" by Alan Feldman from Immortality. © University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.