Dear Reader,
Recently, I had a close encounter with a large, healthy male
coyote. We both froze until he broke our staring contest and
trotted away, leaving me to turn slowly to see if his companion
was behind me – she wasn’t. Although the outcome was
non-violent, it left me shaken. Unable to slough it off, it
took me weeks to process how upset I was. My mother would have
delivered her never failing advice when something really got
stuck, and I couldn’t get over it: Figure out how to get
it out of your craw. Any manner of self-expression would do.
My chosen therapies of choice became writing, making a piece
of art, or both.
Let the poem begin! There’s the challenge when the subject
is hard-wired with emotion, specifically fear. Coincidentally,
I was reorganizing my poetry books and couldn’t resist
sampling contents. During one of many breaks, I came upon a
poem by Kate Rushin that stopped me cold: “I’VE GOT
SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THIS: A SURVIVAL INCANTATION FOR BESSIE
AND LORRAINE,” from The Black Back-Ups. It is a
defiant poem of survival and although it wasn’t about my
situation, I connected immediately. Her first line, “I
see it in your eyes.” became my first line because the
coyote’s eyes leapt into my mind, and he was right there,
stuck in my craw. I reached for my legal pad, wrote “Coyote,
with the first line by Kate Rushin” and was off.
As a poem will, it went here and there, with hundreds of words
and stanza deletions, in a sort of birthing process, until it
was ready enough to bring to my monthly writing response group.
They were patient and sympathetic toward what I was trying to
express. A helpful comment came about my Achilles heel - the
ending: “What emotion are you going for?” Suspended
anxiety? Relief? My weak offer was, “Deescalation.”
But honestly, I did not know that evening, which meant there
was much more work to be done. I needed to decide the poem’s
boundaries and what story it needed to tell. Do I hold the poem
in the moment of confrontation or reveal the non-violent outcome?
As of now, “Coyote” is coming along.
