Poetry: Wild Dogs Fleeing
Guffawing Is Good For Us
Good lord, what bloody awful times we’re living in! Therefore, here’s a poem about the guffawing flesh of coyotes. This Em Strang person is doing a lot of guffawing these days. What else is fruitful in these times of authoritarianism, bigotry, hate, etc? (Please feel free to list those fruits in the comments section below.)
This is an ekphrastic poem about coyotes trying to escape the fire of the Bosque woods, which surrounded the home of visual artist, Meinrad Craighead. If you’ve been reading my occasional posts here, you’ll know that this is one in a series of ekphrastic poems, published in my most recent collection, Firebird (Shearsman, 2024).
It’s funny how this poem is so pertinent to our times. I wrote it back in 2022 or 2023 – I can’t remember exactly – and it was pertinent then, too, of course. We are living in the fiery decades. Or maybe it’s the fiery century. In any case, everything everywhere is being burnt down. Fire is raging all around us and, like the coyotes, we want to escape it, to find a way out, to survive. Of course we do – life is so utterly delicious, painful and wild! Most of us aren’t so keen on the pain bit, but sometimes it dawns on this Em Strang person that pain is a kind of fire, a little (or big) cauterisation that enables a wound to heal. Whoosh!
This poem is a celebration of the animal body and the energy that enlivens it. It’s a nod to the impermanence of flesh and the delightful embodied yes of the flesh. I like to imagine the coyotes’ muscles with a life of their own; just as I like to ponder the inner workings of my own strange body. What messages are being conveyed, muscle to muscle? What fire is in the language of our meat?
Perhaps guffawing is good for us in today’s world? Today, on Easter Friday, I will guffaw at the crosses we’re all nailing ourselves to. Not because I don’t feel grief – I do – but because it reminds me not to get lost inside the darkness forever; it acts as a kind of premonition of the light. In the end, I think Jesus understood this. I think coyotes understand it, too.
Wild Dogs Fleeing
Coyote flesh lives a guffawing life
from the first myocytes
to the muscle’s last stretch.
It guffaws in the least likely places –
the hot pits of coyote legs,
in the ruff and the rump.
If you listen with the right kind of ears,
you can hear the waggish chuckle.
Even as it pounds with blood,
hot and straining,
the flesh is droll,
each ligament raucous with laughter.
It knows something we don’t.
It must know something
we’ve neither thought nor dreamt.
One muscle jokes with another muscle
and together they circumnavigate the world
of the burning woods
beneath the hot pelt of the wild dogs.
Miraculous flesh!
Wise, thirsty, desperate flesh!
Some bright spark asks what’s so funny
and the flesh says, “This!”