Contributor’s Marginalia: J.P. Grasser responds to “Coyote” by Chelsea Woodard


Some summer nights, we shined a spotlight out the back window of the farmhouse. The coyotes’ eyes speckled the dark & it felt like the space-time continuum had collapsed in on itself. We were just pups ourselves. This was Nebraska. This was animal curiosity.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the animals & what they make of us. I mostly know what we make of them:

In the Gulf: alligator-skin boots. In Buenos Aires: porcupine-skin belts.

For Montanans: wall-art. For pot-aficionados: Planet Earth. For industry: scented-candles, resins, lipsticks, couches, good names for cars.

Everywhere: dinner (though in the Great Plains, dinner means lunch); everywhere: metaphor (again, I’m reminded of the etymology of Pastoral, again); everywhere: companions.

Recently, a poet told me that there’s a fundamental incongruity between Nature Poets and Environmental Poets. I think she meant: wonder necessarily precludes ethical directive, & vice versa. Maybe that’s true. But, being stubborn, I’ve fought that division pen & claw, so to speak.


Chelsea Woodard’s “Coyote” ends: “wary and eager, a thief in your home.” It’s a beautiful image, though more true than beautiful (which is the whole point, isn’t it?).

For three years now, I’ve been trying to imagine a de-anthropocentricized world. It all started with a bumper sticker slapped on a sign by a trailhead: It’s their world, we just live in it.

& I thought, that’s wrong. Imagine the sylvan chorus. Try to imagine them as un-disneyified as possible, without saucer-sized eyes & bleached teeth, etc. Imagine them saying This is our world! You just live in it! It’s laughable because it’s impossible, but also because animals don’t possess, not like us. Covet, sure; get jealous, definitely; but possess, own?

So, I’ve tried to imagine a world without people at the center. How would it look, in practice? What would it mean if we understood carrying capacity as an instinctual mandate, not the thing to be reasoned out of? If migration didn’t conjure geo-political displacement, but a rite, a ritual? I try to imagine it, but each formulation frays at the edges.

I’ve begun to think of our own herding dog, our beloved Gus, as a poem. See, he can’t express—not the way capital-r-reason defines the term, anyhow—he experiences. He smells Time (really, look it up). Gus is a good poem.

Chelsea’s “Coyote” is a good poem too, for the same reason. To my inkling, it’s all energy & intimation. Sure, there’s the narrative at work to shepherd the reader through, but in the end, I’m left not with story, but with experience. Take these lines, about three-quarters of the way through:

their emptiness seemed like a hole
in the dark, sharp in the cold

cast of the moon.

Think on that one for a second. I sure had to. How can the dark have a hole, be perforated? (Shine a light out the back window of the farmhouse, being one answer). How can “coyotes howling” be empty to begin with, given that their howls are the presence of sound, not its absence? It just is.

Now convince me that’s expression. I’ll convince you that’s experience. Between you & me, I won’t be convinced. (I’ve already confessed the stubbornness.)

But it’s the experience of the last line I keep coming back to. I keep wondering, who’s the thief here. Superficially, it’s easy enough to venture that the thief’s the dog from Chelsea’s other (equally good) poem, “Herding Dog,” in Issue 15.2.

Sub-surface, though, gets trickier. I keep hearing “wily” behind “wary.” So, it’s both. I keep thinking, there’s no such thing as ownership to wild dogs. I keep thinking: Wildness is domestication minus time; domestication is wildness minus time.

One of my students recently introduced me to the term “Charismatic Megafauna”—a nice little epithet that describes large species who’ve garnered mass appeal. (They’re often the ones who end up as giant stuffed animals in zoo gift-shops or on Green Peace pamphlets—the elephants, the orcas, the pandas). I love it minorly, because I collect these sorts of phrases. I love it majorly because it belies our positioning in the world. They’re charismatic to us. To a raft of sea-otters, on the other hand, orcas—eh, not so charismatic.


So what about Chelsea’s bale-high coyote?

What I love about this poem is its instinct to raze the division between us-people & them-animals, to invert it. The coyotes—ghostly as they may be in the speaker’s memory—are the charismatic ones. The domesticated dog—the pet, the familiar, the companion—isn’t charismatic, just real, just a stranger.

Which is what Gus must think of me, when he smells my new iteration each morning.

I couldn’t say whether Chelsea has found that middle-ground between Nature Poet & Environmental Poet, but the poem feels to be neither. So perhaps it’s both.