canto 19
Thor came with beer
and a sling hugged arm
and on the evening balcony
he told me about the desert
he remembered
on a drive from an old life
to a new life, here,
where, a beer in his good hand,
he gave an image of a coyote
with a hat and boots, yes,
in someone’s window.
one night I opened
the window and reached
in and got that sucker
out and put it in my truck
and went home
and showed Lucy.
I said, Look at this.
She said, Look at my face.
The next morning
I went back
with the coyote
and opened the window
of the house
and put the coyote back
in the place
behind the window,
which was a table.
I closed the window
and went back
home, and there was a man
in the living room
talking to Lucy.
He told me,
Did you put my coyote
back?
Thor raised his beer
to the sky, to the clouds
coming. He laughed.
I asked him,
Why, why did you
put it back, this strangeness
in the window.
He said it was easy:
because I looked
at Lucy’s face
and Lucy’s face
says things.
You just look at her
and you know that she’s
saying something.
but how do you know
what her face is saying?
You don’t, he said,
you just know it’s saying something.
A face at a distance from understanding
can appear like a dune
under the sun,
a dune out of which a tree
has somehow footed itself
in life, making a life in the sand,
waiting for rain,
a tree soon to understand
perhaps that it hadn’t chosen well
or that a whale one day
may form itself in the sky,
change shape,
drift over the gray mountains,
the tree, which is part
of an image of misunderstanding,
urges its hard knees
out of the hot sand
and starts its journey
to find the cloud
and gain knowledge of it.
Maricela and Cruz
appeared with wine
and picked up on the image
of the tree and the coyote
because for some reason
unexplained Thor
took the coyote
and rested its carcass
beside the tree
and both of them,
the tree and the coyote
. . .
I imagine, said Cruz,
the tree and the coyote
came over a hill
in the desert,
these odd
companions, coming
over a hill,
descending,
and they encountered
another hill
where someone
had dropped random stones
or rocks, and the coyote
told the tree:
I think I’ve been here before.
I listened from a chair,
waited for the clouds
to grow closer,
listened as Thor
told Cruz and Maricela
the story of the coyote
with the hat and the boots
in the window
and the man he found
speaking to Lucy,
and again, again,
somehow the coyote
and tree were conjoined.
but where did the tree
come from? Maricela asked.
Yes, the tree,
where did it come from?
Cruz asked.
Thor said:
what tree?
The tree on the dune,
I saw one once,
I said,
and when I saw it
I wondered:
how can such a thing be living?
