This song builds intimacy out of disconnected fragments that never quite form a complete picture. The coyote of the title never appears, which makes it the perfect name for a relationship the speaker can sense but can't pin down. What reads like domestic closeness is actually a catalog of objects and half-remembered moments, the kind of inventory you take when someone is already gone.
You close the door in the home / Makes the pictures fall from the wall
The pictures falling reads like cartoon violence, but it's the only concrete action in the entire song. The speaker doesn't realize they're describing an ending as their opening image.
In my heart you number one / Like the mornings spent together / Fell for you at the Texaco pump
Falling in love at a gas station is pure Lenderman, turning consumer geography into confession. But notice the verb tense: 'fell' is past, while 'you number one' lacks the verb entirely, like the present can't support a complete sentence.
Your eyes are getting round / What's making the noise outside / When it's quiet on a Sunday night
This might be tenderness or it might be paranoia. The song won't clarify. Either way, the speaker is watching someone react to a sound that shouldn't be there, which is as close as we get to the coyote showing up.
Under the socks and shoes and underwear
The drawer inventory is where intimacy lives here. Not bodies, not declarations, but the mundane stuff you only see if you've stayed over enough times to know where someone keeps their socks.
The song never resolves whether the beloved is still here or already gone, which might be the point. The coyote stays offscreen, the noise outside stays unexplained, and the speaker keeps describing a relationship through objects instead of moments. What sticks is the feeling that intimacy, for this narrator, is always something observed from a slight distance, even when you're close enough to know what's in someone's underwear drawer.