Nina Murray
[THE COYOTES ARE JUDGING ME]
“The coyotes are judging me.”
……………………………………………….Jenny Slate
The coyotes are judging me.
The coyotes are excellent judges of character
attuned to minute oscillations of will
opportunistic in their insight. They are misanthropes at heart, the coyotes,
also canids, and therefore cynics
and proceed from the assumption of not the best or the worst
as the essence of the human condition but inertia
the failure to bestir ourselves to invention
righteous indignation
pursuit
of anything.
They are vitriolic, the coyotes,
caustic in their ridicule.
In fact I wonder if I am really being judged by coyotes or
whether they abandoned the subject of me long ago
as not sufficiently profound or entertaining and if it is in fact I
who continue to want to be judged by coyotes because
it is better to be in their scrutiny when one of them,
scruff-shouldered and unhurried, crosses a corporate drive
in the early morning dusk in front of me
than to be on that road .. alone.
Nina Murray is a native of the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv. She is a poet and literary translator from the Ukrainian and Russian languages. As a U.S. diplomat, she has served in Lithuania, Canada, and Russia. Her chapbook Minimize Considered is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
Image credit: Levi Saunders on Unsplash
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #19.
