Rebirth...

One foot after the other, I spent plenty of time looking down at the cracked earth surrounding much of Wichita Falls, Texas while doing a lot of running there in the early 1970s. The countryside was more flat, open and dry than any I had ever experienced growing up in the Northeast. Western movie stuff, and great running country, mile after mile of flat solitude. Tumbleweeds caught in barbed wire fences leapfrogged with the occasional dead coyote draped across jagged lines, slain leaders intended to remind his clan that like the Native Americans themselves, they were no longer welcome here.

One fresh coyote, a traffic fatality that appeared unexpectedly on a morning run, lay peacefully in a fetal position at the junction of blacktop and scrub, allowing close inspection. Seemingly undamaged, lost in the dreams of eternal sleep, he became a mile marker for me. I knew when to turn around on a five-mile jog. But, like this picture, the thing that interested me the most was the new life he gave to that split, parched landscape. In the course of daily runs over the next three weeks, his body was consumed and scattered by the vultures, carrion beetles, and varmints who appreciate a good dinner with the dead... but his head itself, never moved. Dull, useless eyes, skin stretched and cracked like the surrounding earth, revealing bone. The remains of a right eye stared up at the blinding oven, the inescapable burn blistering down, as new life clawed its way out. One delicate purple wildflower sprouted from a hollow eye socket. It seemed to please that tattered head as his lips melted away, leaving only a double saw of grinning teeth leering with joy at his own beautiful rebirth, punctuated by that one perfect flower.