Coyote Sees Himself in Water

Averts his gaze: nare & lore, a body;
of water braided into itself: bone
of herring, its blackness among the bone
white rush plumage against his bare body,

wind (upstroke) cascades a woman’s body.
Coyote grows feathers over keel bone,
thrusting, as if to buoy gently—        blown
over himself, prone to leave the body

he embraced. No, there is no beauty here!
Estuary of thick mutter and honk,
up close: water, herring, & wind howl bare,
gnat embedded in matted feathers. Here—

Copyright © 2022 by Tacey M. Atsitty. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 9, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“What do we see in our reflection? Coyote sees a beloved self. What is reflected on the surface is different from what is seen further beneath. Coyote sees his beauty and ripples of love, but, when he really looks, he finds something much darker, even in transformation. Formally, this sequence follows a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA and breaks in the third stanza with CDEC. It is decasyllabic and the correlatio foreshadows the connections with water, bird, and wind.”
—Tacey M. Atsitty