Coyote Wine

A gray wolf standing in the woods

SKU: RP014

Price: $1.50

Length: 4'20"

Instrumentation: SATB choir with divisi

Delivery: PDF score will be delivered via email within a few days

Written in the winter of 2012, Coyote Wine (for SATB chorus) is a setting of Sean Fleming’s (b. 1989) poem of the same name.

Gray hide emerges from gray mud,

your hair rusting at the shoulders

beneath the pruned vineyard rows

where old clusters turn to raisins.

The wicks of your ears piercing

the fog for a rabbit’s death squeal

tuned exactly like our corroding

chains reeling repetitiously.

The reward of civilization

is suffering, labored order

pray for our squandered abuse

yours is unconscious grace.

No mechanism to your vanishing

like wisdom bled from an old mind

like water swallowing your tracks

you have made us your wilderness.

The poet says “I wrote Coyote Wine after seeing a coyote in the middle of a vineyard while biking through southern Oregon. Coyotes are one of the few animals that have actually increased their range with the spread of humanity, so I was writing primarily about how our own proliferation helps other animals, that our civilization becomes a wilderness.” He adds “symmetry and order is not the law of nature, but a tool for propelling its chaotic beauty. The decay of civilization is but a reef for new life.”