We all want to see a mammal.
Squirrels & snowshoe hares don’t count.
Voles don’t count. Something, preferably,
that could do us harm.
—Elizabeth Bradfield

Across the country from Connecticut to Mississippi* to California  bears are waking up and lumbering out of their dens.

No sign of them in my neighborhood yet–I’m hoping there’s enough food on the mountain to satisfy them and keep them out of trouble.

*Natchez: A wildlife biologist is warning people not to feed a young black bear that’s been wandering the streets of downtown.  US Today 4/19/17

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
—William Stafford

Years ago I heard my first William Stafford poem on the radio program Writer’s Almanac.  Garrison Keillor mentioned that Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1914 and I was curious to know more about him. Much to my surprise he had graduated from Liberal High School, my high school, but I  don’t remember ever hearing him mentioned.  Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.  

I’ve been looking for the perfect poem of his to share but have been unable to find the one about minnows that I wanted to post.  The one linked below is a new one to me, a chance encounter on a dark road.

Traveling through the Dark 

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
—Kobayashi Issa

My housekeeping philosophy until the imminent arrival of company. Time to get out the dust mop—all spiders have got to go!

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president’s portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls.  We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.
—Maxine Cumin

One of my favorites—a poem about a horse named Jack and so much more.

The little goats like my mouth and fingers,
and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board
a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field.
—Mark Doty

I discovered Pescadero and Mark Doty in The New Yorker.  The magazine recently launched a new feature on Twitter, a poem a day from their archives.  Check it out at @tnypoetry.

Yes.  I know my formatting was messed up on yesterday’s poem-—the trials of trying to post from a smart phone.  It’s fixed now.

Why have you chosen to punish the coyote
rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,
shucked the fur from his tail
and fashioned it into a scabby cane?
—Mark Wunderlich

Coyote
Photo By: Paula Nixon

I said no photos but couldn’t resist posting this one again.  It goes so well with today’s poem, Coyote, with Mange.

My little corner of New Mexico would not be the same without our native canid.  This year our state legislature came close to banning coyote killing contests, but it didn’t happen.  The bill passed three committees and the Senate, but died at the end of the  session before it made it to a vote on the floor of the House.

Maybe next year.

a fainting, ghostly presence
with a tail so naked it was
embarrassed to drag behind him.
—Faith Shearin

My mother-in-law and I sat at the kitchen table.  She was eating oatmeal while I read Possum in the Garbage aloud.  Mary doesn’t say much, so I wasn’t sure if she liked the poem or not.  She has her favorites, many memorized in grammar school back in New Jersey.  Somewhere, I have a recording of her reciting Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
—Elizabeth Bishop

Looking back, I can’t remember how I got into a conversation about a moose with a complete stranger at my local grocery store.  We were both juggling an armful of stuff in the 15-items-or-less line and found ourselves comparing notes on the animals we had seen on trips to Yellowstone.  Elk, coyote, buffalo.  But it was the moose, she told me, that made her cry.

The Moose is a long poem, like the bus trip it describes, but it’s worth the journey through the stanzas for the reward at the end.

No one would take her when Ruth passed,
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, “She’s old. Somebody
should put her down.”
—Ron Koertge

Mondays have improved greatly since I discovered American Life in Poetry.  Ted Kooser’s weekly column slips into my email inbox when I’m not looking, distracted by my to-do list for the week.  He rarely prints a poem that I don’t enjoy.

This recent one about an old cat named Lily is one of my favorites.

This is a real wolf, standing on all fours,
his rich fur bristling in the night air,
his head is bent over the book open on the ground.
∼Billy Collins

A happy coincidence that Lobo Week ends on the day that National Poetry Month begins!  Here is a link to the poem Wolf, excerpted above.

I plan to post a poem or a link to a poem each day in April.  No pictures, just words.  Mix freely with a big dose of imagination!