Coyote Calls us to the Things of This World

The howl of the coyote is America's original national anthem.   - Dan Flores


Coyote Call

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

                           - Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

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Wilbur had a way of keeping all the balls in the air .... -- AE Stallings

The Juggler:  Stallings remembering Wilbur 

Trismegistus

O Egypt, Egypt -- so the great lament

Of thrice-great Hermes went --

Nothing of thy religion shall remain

Save fables, which thy children shall disdain. 

His grieving eye foresaw

The world's bright fabric overthrown

Which married star to stone

And charged all things with awe.

And what, in that dismantled world, could be

More fabulous than he?

Had he existed? Was he but a name

Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim

Of every ancient quack 

That could from a smoky cell

By talisman or spell

Coerce the Zodiac?

Still, we summon him at midnight hour

To Milton's pensive tower,

And hear him tell again how, then and now,

Creation is a house of mirrors, how,

Each herb that sips the dew

Dazzles the eye with many small

Reflections of the All -- 

Which after all, is true.  

- Richard P Wilbur

(links from National Geographic, American Scholar, The New Yorker)