Rebecca Valley, who will be attending Bennington College in the fall to study English literature, is a longtime Young Writers Project writer. “This piece,” she says, “was written to the soundtrack of a pack of coyotes howling in the woods behind my uncle’s home in the middle of the night. The plot line is half truth and half imagination, which is how most stories end up, I think.”
Two Coyotes in the Yard
By Rebecca Valley
I’ve got a loneliness that I pray to
that has your green eyes and my soul.
There are coyotes in the yard now
and when I called you
you spoke to them
told them that I am very frightened
of their blackness, their eyes in the night.
She is, you said, blind right now.
She cannot see you. If you come into the moonlight
she will know your soul
and she will not be so afraid.
And we stood at the back window
and watched them stand still, hundreds of feet,
merely, of separation a greyness in the night
and lift their heads, the pair, and howl one after the other.
It is about speaking the same tongue, you said.
And I told you that fleeting love
has too many words, and not enough
and that it outlines itself along the spine, see, and you can hear it in her howl
in the night
in the way that she calls back to him from across the broad lawn
afraid of an echo back that says, “I am
farther away than you thought, darling”
or worse, her own voice, empty,
only one pair of tracks.