“Coyote Hour” is set in southern Maine, at a peninsula land spit just north of Cape Porpoise called Goose Rocks Beach. It’s a place of memory, of family. I love it so much. Both of my parents have been active in conservation there and have lived there for many years. It’s a place that shows up in dreams and poems and is a touchstone for so many other things.

At Goose Rocks during the pandemic. It was this moment where everything was coming back, and people were joyfully flooding back to the beach and being in groups and being outdoors. I had been reading some of the poets of New England—in particular Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo” and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” My poem was kind of this response, this update—here is New England today, here is southern Maine today, engaging in a conversation with these two amazing poets from history.

It’s everything. I write so much more from place than, say, from character. I think place focuses us. I’m thinking about Seamus Heaney talking about the Irish landscape and everything that comes up from it, including sound and story. And how place has such an impact, not just visually—I’m thinking of Maine, of the scent, the tang of salt air and balsam, even the smell of dock. These things are so visceral that sometimes they come to the senses first before even a story or a lyric does.

I started with the Saturday rental turnover. All the local raccoons know of this, and summer’s their big buffet time because there are all these yummy leftovers. The raccoons tend to knock things over—I was thinking of the hieroglyphics of these lobster carcasses and clam shells. The poem moves from the late summer into the fall season, when everything quiets down. The wildlife comes closer in, the seals come closer in. So that was the arc, to start with that festive garbage morning, the remnants of these family gatherings and vacations—and then the raccoons pilfering that, to show what the registers are of our humanity on the natural life. We’re seeing, like a lot of places, this huge increase in coyotes. They’re pretty bold, but they make themselves more apparent when the season ends. It’s this remarkable thing after Labor Day, there’s this quiet, and I wanted the poem’s end to be a register of that, but also a kind of elegy and grieving for development. There’s the sense that not only in Maine but in so many places, our natural world shrinks and shrinks.

All kinds of things. I’ll ask them to write about a place where, when they were young, they played a lot, or they spent a lot of that early time—a basketball court or a backyard or a lake. I’ll ask them to start writing from the senses—sound, image, smell—and then to ask themselves, what kind of song or story might come from there? And I’ll have them do exercises, like the kind of Buddhist meditation exercise where they go into the woods and really listen deeply, and then write. Or stare at a leaf for a long time and then write.

I went into the woods during the eclipse here in Virginia. There was a heavy cloud cover, but I just wanted to listen and see how the sound might shift. I have a garden in my backyard—I’ll go sit there just to be around these green and growing things and be around bird life. But it isn’t really till I go back to Maine—I go into the woods or get into a kayak on the ocean. Part of this poem was registering a grief that I’m part of causing—the ocean becoming overrun and more polluted. For me, part of the poem is elegy for the place. A lot of times I go into nature these days and feel both wonder but also grief.