Emma Aylor

Light Values

Frederick Sommer, Coyote, 1945

The dead coyote doesn’t look so

   different from the way

  we’ve buried ourselves—

 in essential customs

thousands of years back,

   so that when we unearth us,

  little glory stays:

 bones posed

in shapes inscrutable

   and evidently important,

  arms and legs folded neater

 than the coyote’s collapse

and thus somewhat pitiful,

   made minor. The loose

  ribs I compare

 to fallen vegetation—

reed, mum petal,

   stalk—and now I see

  the animal’s craned

 neck like a Neolithic lover’s,

the ones buried eye

   to fallow eye with

  another, bone across bone,

 but the coyote is alone

at least in art, because we

   can’t circle what the lens-edge

  trims out—alone

 but for the flesh

that in grayscale reads

   as crustose lichen. Below,

  the desert greens open as if

 to echo the death

in form, bearing the carcass

   as it’s made known,

  made pious, made

 that we might—I don’t know—

compare its ears to those

   of a loved dog.

  They look almost warm

 but its eye too is empty,

and as for the color

   I can’t say what is skin

  or fur or bone, I say

 as for the color, the light

values too close, chalk on chalk,

   living, like some

  lichens, on thin air.

 How could I settle

the moral value of forcing

   inspection of the animal long

  enough to recognize

 not only my dog

but what we share

   as companions of time—

  I say to myself (I don’t want

 to listen): the plants appear

stationed to bear, until

   earth and of-earth rasp

  together, the folded

 canine up.

[VANITAS]