I woke with coyotes in my throat

Do you hear them, too?

I woke with coyotes in my throat. I didn’t hear them at first. The huff of my heavy breathing drowned out the sound, here in the dark between midnight and dawn. I was only trying to fall back asleep, but I could hear their sound beneath the heavy breathing, not sure if they we borne of the bad dream I’d just woke from or yesterday’s headlines, the clamor of words and phrases, the ones being scrubbed from the public record this week — Clim . . te chan ge . . . divers.. . transg der // emp . . .y green ergy .. // neurod … ersity . inc..usion . . . Not only the clamor of the words and phrases themselves, but the sudden echoes of their vanishing. Also vanishing: contracts, jobs, people, plans, possibilities.

Do you hear the coyotes, too? It took me a while. It took me slowing and stilling my breath. It took me quieting the clamor, at least for a brief moment, here in the dark. I’m not sure what I’ve done to conjure or summon them. I can’t tell how many there are. I can’t see them. The yips and howls are so faint that I can’t count them. I can’t count them like sheep.

I hear them. Here.

I’m trying to breathe. Quiet the mind, calm the heart, all the best advice forming new layers of clamor. Three techniques to peace, six quick steps to getting the mind to shut the hell up already. Slow down. Shhhh… My breathing changes. The clamor of language, the huff and heave, they are leaving slowly. I start to drift. I shift downward. Then I hear them again, more clearly now. The yips. The howls. A doctor or an asthmatic might tell me that it’s only the raspy sound of obstructed air moving through the anatomy of a neck. A mortal mirage. But I know better. Here, in the half-waking: coyotes.

What I know of their species: They yip and howl when they claim their territory. They yip and howl when they are locating and greeting their family. They yip and howl when they make a kill. They form a chorus, many voices at once, so many coyotes within me.

I think I am telling you this because I never knew they were down there. Or perhaps I once knew but had forgotten. Perhaps it’s just easier to ignore what lies within us. I think I am telling you this because I am now remembering they are down there, I can hear them as if on a distant ridge, as if within me is a distant ridge where a wildness wails. I think I am telling you this because I can hear them now but I do not know what they want. I do not know if they are claiming the ground beneath them, or if they are calling out to those they belong to, or if they are calling out because they are hungry, on the hunt, incarnating their own presence in a world of vanishings.

They are here now, and they come to claim new ground, to find and form family, and to revel in the feast.

(Image: Public domain)

A book I’m reading: Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse

An album I’m (always) listening to: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All the Rest

Art I’m looking at: Rae Stern’s Afterimage at Englewood Arts