Mister Trickster
Coyote’s a fat old man,
now lying
in a bed, crushed
beer cans scattered over
the red shag carpet, second hand plasma screen
showing re‑run comedies,
about nothing, or something
which none of us get
the way Coyote does.
He chuckles and smokes
the last good tobacco
on Earth,
a bundle of sage leaves smoldering
in the silver ash tray.
The sheets are stale and off-
white, the place
dim and untidy,
awful orange
floral print curtains—
another industrial accident
that makes him snort every time he gazes at them—
remain closed
all hours of the day and night
so Coyote doesn’t have to look
at the barren lot outside,
and so he can be himself
without “humans”
looking in.
But sometimes he pins the bottom of the curtains
with a chair, pushes back
the topmost corner,
and resting his head on a pillow,
he stares at clouds for hours on end,
helping them shape-shift
into images and entities
from his vast living memory of the World.
He opens a deep drawer in the night
stand next to the bed, strips
of sticky veneer peeling
up, within the drawer a stack of the world
bibles and a bottle of
hundred-year-old fire
water, eau de vie,
and a smudge-covered snifter.
The Great Mother
shudders with the squeaking
of fake pine,
her pale pink
sateen robe hanging
open as she bends her head over
the hot plate, heating up
a Teflon skillet full of refried beans.
“Use a coaster,” she says.
Coyote prefers her arched
rather than bent,
but he can hear his belly
growling. He pulls the cork
from the bottle with his magnificent teeth,
still sharp, white,
even with all the coffee and tobacco
and sacred wine.
He fills the glass
holding it in front of him,
one eye on the precious fluid
the other eye on the electric projections
of a mind out of touch.
He reaches into the drawer,
grabs the Gita and slips it
under his snifter, placing both
on his belly.
The Great Mother
sighs.
Coyote keeps watching everything,
unworried, unobstructed.
He always has another trick
to play, but he doesn’t have to play anymore
tricks, because the final divine
joke is telling itself out
to a vast and ignorant group
of connivers.