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canto 19 reexamined

there are inflictions
where the eyes may never
close, because
when closed the eyes
remain lit: imagine
Thor with his hammer
and his lock pick
picking and a car
slowly, on the edge
of his knowing,
pulling outside
the hindrances of light,
meaning into dark
where the guilty hide,
Thor working at the lock
and hearing a click,
turning the knob.

then, later,
he told a story,
the judge working at some sharp thing
in his teeth,
knowing exactly what would happen:

Thor gave the judge
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?

the judge asked:
so who’s this Lucy
and should we go for her,
too, an accomplice, maybe,
kin, or lover, no matter,
should we go for her,
too, find her where you
keep her, the last thing
for her to hear
the smash of the cage
closing on her back, like you?

no, no, Thor said:
my mother my mother.
And she’d dead now,
dead now.

I read about it all in the papers,
a classic ring broken
by officials,
procedures, bail denied,
suspicions of murder,
other trails Thor
might have brought with him
here, harbored with a hamburger
in his mouth,
as he garbled
out stories of comefroms
and wheregoings
and images of riches
and mirthsomes
of Lucysex
and otherloversex,
while Maricela and her boyfriend,
Cruz, filled in the spaces
Thor’s feet made in the lose
soil of his tales,
all simply an example
of our nights together.

tell us about the tree
again you saw, so much like
Moses’ tree, in the desert,
burning, and I interrupted
and said: that was my tree,
I’m afraid, which, I reminded,
went something like:
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 the future,
urges its hard knees
out of the hot sand
and starts its journey
to find the cloud
and gain knowledge of it.

ah, an analogy,
Cruz said: the tree
being a human,
the tree as everyman.

his image, Thor’s image,
in the paper square
I held, reading,
was neither this nor that
Thor but a Thor
with raging hair,
and the look he gave
was a commonform accusation,
as if my hand had somehow
had a hand in making
him, and that he would blame
me from a small paper square
in the morning paper
which declared him caught,
imprisoned, done for and finished,
shamed before the world.

two days later
two men gave me a list
and I checked this
and this and this
and this and this
and said yes yes and yes
and they asked why had I not reported
the robbery of those yeses
and I told them:
my father was sick
and I had no care
for anything else.

and two days still
after that I opened
the door and there stood
Lucy with tears under her forehead
and a sad mouth
and I asked her
in and closed the door.