COYOTE COMES with the crack of a branch. With the brush of breeze through lace. With the mothwing flutter of light on your cheek. With the passing of sand through your hands. Coyote comes in the shape of a question: Trespasser? Or trespassed upon? Look behind, he asks. At crossings you made. Scars you left on the land. Barbed wire fences you parted to pass. Bones you dry on your roof. Broken vessels filling your pockets. Uprooted chamisal roots. Headstones you copied. Graves you walked. Stories you stole and called rescuing. No violation on ancestorial sand. Your privilege rationalizing. All the skull-socket ruins you entered without asking. All your obsidian compass-point shards. All the broken rosaries rattling from your shrines. All the driftwood planted in your yard. All the talismans you tend like New Mexican soil. Just evidence of your counterfeit home. Your brother tells you he sees yellow eyes in the dark. Paws tracks outside your frail mother’s walls. Just like you seeking ways to return. Through cholla to make your amends. Through irrigation water in the coffee can pipe. Through cedar smoke embers with wings. Through green chile roasting on a cast-iron comal. Through posole steam angels at Christmas. Through the buried owl blooming into cactus in your yard. Through cobwebs clearing your vistas. Through the candle you must light to leave. Through the coiling smoke of your confession. Through the ground-sniffing ghost you have summoned this night. Through the impassive moon to listen. Coyote comes in the shape of a reckoning. At your back door in your half-sleep awakening. You are the shadow. He is the stone. His gift you were never meant to own —