Songs from Coyote Grace, that sultry threesome, danced along eardrums while words brewed in a pot sipping coffee this morning. Amidst yips and howls from desert dogs shouting their pleas to unleash my heart, I boarded this wagon 37 Days ago. I live just on the edge of these rodeo grounds but didn’t move to the West to be corralled. The wide and wild mesa, the rugged smuggling mountains–again and again, how they PUSH and amuse me. Yet again they implore, “The world needs your voice! Pick up your LIFE!”And I wonder, “Which world, out of so many worlds howls my name amid so many stars in the desert moonlight? Am I a creature of habit? No, a breath untamed by coyote rituals. Just show up and see for yourselves–what can be known can be found crying and circling on the lightest edge of our darkest hours. If you’re lucky, you’ll spy a dog silhouetted against mountains, passionately scribbling on fresh-baked tortillas, pens fed with ink-blood. While afternoon rays bleed from whitening clouds you just might find a whole pack of them, bicycling. With cameras slung over, how they chase at unshootable images, circling round empty, then laughing homeward. Set your eyes seeking and you’re sure to roam blind, for coyotes are masters at invisibly traversing. Two years I’ve spent searching to find only one, dead as a sap-drained tree skeleton. Best to allow them to find you. Coyotes don’t need your attention. What they want is an offering–an invitation to smell and perhaps, taste the scared rabbit inside of you. So sit down. Don’t be wimpish, and risk yourself!

Howl like an Indian drunk on the stars. Begin slowly and awkward. Unskillfully mark your territory. Bark at the moon–the unscrupulous you–the one searching for ways to steal words–waves crashing about like jetsam and flotsam, a derelict past pushed up against boundaries. And by the way, those weeds winding up along the old fence post? Glorious disasters, stop whacking them! And while you’re at it, stop whacking yourself!

Be the fool that you are, the half-witted trickster, goose-chasing uncatchable roadrunners. Leap toward those vapors, boulder-like, falling from cliffs into gorges. You do have a place in the great winding river, more so than ever before, so go ahead, float, then find your way up. Like aspen roots clutched into rock faces, climbing up, up, back up safe to your ledge, only to do it again! Fool that you are! Practicing chasing, practicing falling, practicing floating then climbing again, and again because that’s what coyotes do, and you’re a coyote.

Listen!

You’re the one hell bent on living a life in, and then through, and finally out of herself! So howl! Howwwwl at the moonlight! Sing like the wild bitch that you are! Laugh all the way home like some smitten Margarita when you finally hear the music you’re singing is all the world has ever asked for and needed, The Song of Yourself.

-Susan J. Preston