Coyotes

Last night I woke to the moonlit field
    striped with zigzag bars of shadow
    like a destroyer’s flanks, although
it was a hunchback scream that called,

a limping clamor, on and on,
    to which the bole of a broken apple tree
    turned a dark ear avidly,
to what could not will its own oblivion,

to a sound before mercy was.
    I looked and looked and saw a circle,
    each a smudged gray fumarole,
of it must have been coyotes

jeering madly at their quarry.
    But when I woke a few hours later
    only dawn had stained the pasture.
There was no crime and no body.