Ode to the Coyote

Tan skin, tan voice,
square jaw and white shirt
pulled taut, a posture

of abstinence. Knots
of muscle, broad shoulders,
tight hips, slender legs—

in high school they called him
Coyote because he was so
skinny. Now my father calls

himself a gym rat, fighting
to get back that slimness,
fighting to fill the quiet

where the gnawing
enters with the wish
of weights sliding

onto the barbell, fighting
age with diet and exercise
and secrets. Coyote

is a trickster who fools
the eye, who makes you
believe he could never die.

Coyote told the first lie.
But his slippery tongue
ran off, let loose, and knotted

itself a noose no language
could untangle, because a coyote
is a coyote is a coyote,

the same in English and Spanish,
a perfect cognate. But understand this:
there could be no heroes

nor villains, no beginnings nor
endings, no happiness nor sorrows,
without a Coyote.

My father and I break bread
over this word because it cannot
become lost in translation

like so many others. We eat guiso
de papa, sudado pescado, and
tallarines rojos over this word.

We toast with chicha morada,
maracuyá, and Inca Kola over
this word. For twenty years

we have sliced panettone on
New Year’s with this word,
our bridge from Trujillo, Peru

to Auburn, Washington, from
booming waves of terracotta
roofs and tangled telephone

wires to dark forests and angled
houses huddled close around the heat
of the railroad. Here, electricity

travels underground, buzzes
beneath the concrete, the little
shake in our tires, the pep in our

step, the caffeine in our veins. Here,
coyotes howl at the witching hour
like a crowd of crying babies, from

the swamp hills across the valley
to the farmland laced with electricity
pylons like paper chains of pancaked

Eiffel towers where he’s resided since
she left him, waiting for a spark
that could only cause a fire.

As a child, he watched cartoons
from morning to noon, just him
and the screen, Wile E. Coyote

chasing after the Road Runner
again and again and again—
and every day, I pass a coyote

lying by the side of the freeway
just before Golden Given Road,
facing away

from passing cars. It has been rotting
there for three weeks in the stench of paper
sulfur, oil, and its own flesh, in long

puddles broken up by grooved cement
mirroring the sky above, cerulean smoked
puffs of white. Three weeks, and no one

has come to bury it. Again and again
and again I look in the rearview mirror,
but I can’t see its expression.