Coyote

COYOTE

Standing motionless in the hour whispered before dawn,

you are looking at yourself except you don't look like you;

you are looking at yourself except what you see is scrawny,

snarl-mouthed, leery; you are looking at yourself except

you're not because the thing doing the looking is no longer

itself, is changed in the act of seeing, is changed into the thing

seen, is itself seen, then forgotten, remembered later on

as something foreign to itself, like amber carrying with it

the memory of a tree to which it bears no resemblance,

yet somehow still contains.