Sighting by Lisa Creech Bledsoe

born morning

coffee

steam-drift

peripheral—did you?

slipping movement

downridge: brown, lean

gliding silent

toward the house

fall equinox: poke stems

sliming, crooked

hooked apple-bare twigs

greenvine tangle

confusion

furrowed, not cats

coyote, no: smaller

fox-like

languid

nothing matches

rising from the kitchen table

on a surge of instinct

out the back door

and around:

she emerges

from under the deck

ears cupped toward my approach

dark amber

sun-broken dapples

curious but

stiff with unknown

she has only seen one spring,

one summer: hunger is yet

a gray-clad stranger

I stomp: go!

unlearned lynx

run (loping, unhurried)

hunt woodrats, voles

on the ridge up-past there

we won't meet again

this year, but

perhaps

the next

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Watched by crows and friend to salamanders, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer in the mountains of Western North Carolina. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and author of two full-length books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has new poems in The Blue Mountain Review, American Writers Review, Sky Island Journal, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Red Fez, and River Heron Review.