Mark Doty, "Heaven's Coast"

I looked up, into the face of a coyote ...

Then from nowhere I thought, He's been with Wally, he's come from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my -- ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love? Perhaps it doesn't matter. I've never seen one in the middle of the day before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter. Like my seals, the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally's look forward home -- his old home -- from the other world; not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship; they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can't begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.