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      October 27, 2017Coyote CountryMilton Bates

      for Taylor Mitchell, 1990–2009

      If she loved anything more than music,
      her mother said, it was nature. That’s why
      she wouldn’t have wanted her killers killed 
      for doing what coyotes do. 
             I thought
      of that young folk singer, hiking alone
      on Cape Breton Island, as they charged
      toward me, churning up the snow, their eyes
      on fire with the setting sun. Just then
      a rabbit erupted from a swale between us
      and juked around my boots. One coyote
      followed left, the other right, so close
      I could have stroked their fur.
                   So they were real,
      those phantoms whose frantic yipping I heard
      late at night in counterpoint to sirens, 
      as though that wail of human pain drove them 
      to hysteria. My island was no Cape Breton, 
      just a scruffy patch of county land 
      lapped on all sides by city. Not wilderness, 
      by any means, but not quite urban either, 
      if animals like these could live there 
      undetected.
           They were pacing around
      a pile of brush when I caught up with them, 
      probing with paw and muzzle, too intent 
      to notice me. I was luckier in my 
      coyotes than she was, the day her love 
      of nature went unrequited.
              Selfishly, 
      perhaps, I save my love for those who love 
      me back. Yet I would hate to lose the little 
      that remains of wildness where I live.
      I left them to their hunt, returning home 
      by streets that seemed no longer so familiar.

      from #57 - Fall 2017

      Milton Bates

      “I’ve lived for all but a dozen of my seventy-plus years in the upper Midwest, most of them in Milwaukee, the self-proclaimed Machine Shop of the World. Like most Rust Belt cities, Milwaukee has had to re-invent itself since the days when my father and grandfather worked in its machine shops. That evolution, together with the city’s history of absorbing wave upon wave of immigrants, makes it a stimulating place in which to live and work. And we do work, whether making heavy machinery or poems. In few cities is the work ethic so revered and so strictly observed, even by artists and writers.”

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