Dealing With Horrific Things

Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong — in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.”

--Neil Gaiman

Coyote

“Please, someone, say something. Anything.”

Silence lingers because

all I can think is

“Keep the jelly donut down”

and the coyote is off-limits.

So Abbie lists the coloring books

she bought for Josh, again,

but I don’t stop her;

I’m too busy thinking about the dead coyote.

It doesn’t matter how loud I yelled

MOM, LOOK, MOM, NO

or how fast she screamed

I’M SORRY SO SORRY SO SORRY

because the oil tanker wasn’t slowing down

so neither could we.

I will not be comfortable in my seat.

In my head I’ve run the physics

over and over in every direction but

the convergence was entirely inevitable.

It happened just how you would expect it to.

On the other side of the median

bronze and sweaty, shining with fear,

the coyote’s heart is pounding and

his legs are pumping through grass

towards an accident I dread for

longer than the impact and

shorter than the aftermath.

Our bumper hits his shoulder

and the whiplash snaps his neck

cutting short the defeated yelp

which morphs into our three frightened cries

when the wheels roll over his body.

They keep talking, too quickly.

I lift my feet off of the car;

wish we could stop and take a walk.

I don’t want the weight of anything

but dirt to push on my soles.

I don’t think it matters what he was running from;

or if he was heading into something

with so much blind determination

it was worth the risk of dying.

Either way I cannot change it,

could not save him.

So we change the light bulb

on the broken left hand turn signal

and pop in a Fred & Ginger flick

to forget about him,

but I will see him again, tonight,

in his best tails and taps,

reminding me that he was important.