Today's poem is Canidae is a Spectrum by Jenna Rozelle. It is read by Julia Bouwsma.
Canidae is a Spectrum
The other morning there was a gray fox at my front door and a coyote at the back.
I couldn’t decide what I wanted this to mean so I asked a friend who said “Canidae is a spectrum”. This gave me something to gnaw on while I worried over winter coming and family going and I found I wasn’t good for much except chasing bunnies through the brush and tearing the meat off roasted bones.
I tried praying for the first time in maybe ever.
Well, I didn’t try, I didn’t plan to, I just turned a corner and stumbled into the sun pinking the sea and sunk into prayer by the roses. They weren’t answered - weren’t even heard - and in hindsight they sound as banal as trying to take this photo of the sunset on the waves, thinking it’ll mean something. I snatched the petals off the rose and stuffed them in my breast pocket, so the next day when I see this light blazing through the beeches and get hit with a whiff of the ocean I remember you can be in more than one place at once.
I look up.
I look down.
I sit on a stump.
A buck walks in, grunting softly.
He’s glistening brown and so at home here in the shape-shifting darkening woods
with the coyotes singing the sundown all around us.
I look out my bedroom window and see the full hunter’s moon reflected four times
and there’s a dim yellow light shining from downstairs
and blue from behind the trees
and I can’t tell what’s inside and what’s out.