As I came out of the pine wood
this morning above the river,
the fourth one that I’ve crossed
since I started on the road,
the strangest thing I’d ever seen
came running down to meet me,
barefoot in blackthorn winter,
naked and shaking from head to foot.
The snow came down in tiny flakes
where he and I came face to face,
both of us struck stupid.
We stood there, eye-to-eye, while
I had long enough to ask myself,
What is this poor, forked thing?
What does it fly from,
or what is it running down?
How will it even feed itself?
Sprung, I reckoned, from the gothic heap
that sprawls on the summit of the hill.
Too proud to scavenge, that’s plain to see.
How will it even survive?
How will it live now that it’s gotten free?
Four rivers I crossed to get here,
if you don’t believe me just ask.
Sister raven on the salt marsh saw
and croaked out her black-winged valediction:
Sunstruck porpoises dive offshore
where submarines sleep like the dead.
The towers along the coast abandoned,
the villages silent and dark,
the store at Six Mile Corner
where the flag still hangs by the door
hadn’t heard human voices
for weeks before I left.
I took to the Wolf Road, crossing
only through culverts at first.
When I’d traveled two days, no traffic,
I knew the road was my own
and sang for wolf my brother
but the timber and he were long gone.
Who will I turn to now?
Or who will succor the keystone?
I sang, oh I sang in the hope
I was wrong, my song rang out along
the blueberry heath with its neat little shacks
and the pine barrens rolling up and down.
Three days up the Wolf Road
I sang for brother dog
and listened a very long time
for an answer that never came.
Fool whose foolish forebears
indentured themselves foolishly
and paid out in empty loyalty
to the hairless who fed them scraps.
I looked for the fool in the places
where I had found him before,
where passing I’d looked in at night,
into a world of blazing light, to find him
dreaming and twitching by his dish.
Bubble and squeak was simmering on the stove,
the children were watching puppets on TV,
and what I thought looking in was,
What family even are these?
It matters not what family, now,
since the war, if war is what it was,
has extinguished the pack entirely,
or the only remnant, it seems, is here.
This one has the mark above his eye.
This one is a sign of things to come.
Therefore I must do whatever
it takes to make sure I’m near him
so we might help each other, if we can,
so I know what he’s doing, if not.
A coyote can adapt to hard times.
A man can adapt, with help.
This is the basis of our covenant.
| Rick Doyle is the managing attorney at a small nonprofit providing civil legal representation to survivors of domestic violence in down east Maine. His poems have been published in The Cafe Review, Puckerbrush Review, Kennebec, and online at A Parallel Universe. His plays have been read or staged at Stonington Opera House, Penobscot Theatre, and other venues. He was Playwright in Residence at New Surry Theatre in Blue Hill, Maine, and his one-act play, Regalia, was selected for a reading in the Maine Playwrights’ Contest. |  |