Divination
This poem appears in The Love of a Good Man.
You tell me, "Everything has a foil,"
a statement as spontaneous as sand.
And everything here is new to me—
the street, the open door, the day, sun-tinged,
your hands that shuffle the deck
worn down by time like confidence
of cardsharps. And I think of the man
who no longer calls a woman wife,
or the man who, upon another man,
wishes great strife, or, as you put it,
"the death of a situation." In secret,
they both bay at the moon, but show it
separate piety, and so take separate
places in society: One will be feared,
another loved and welcomed in the home…
"I'll buy the stand," a woman says,
"She'll buy the sphere." A man muses,
"It doesn't lie flat anymore;
money is weird." I am amused by
the brooms arrayed in back, so colourful,
so diffident. A witch that cannot hex
won't heal. In posing questions, we must ask
what's difficult, or different.
Yet simply wait for touch of touch,
the parting of the strands by repetition,
that gentlest echo in the bone
that holds us close, as walls of Jericho
on every channel start to smoke, then fall and burn.
You hear the wrong noise, ask the customer
to try, try again against the back.
I footnote every unacknowledged inner part.
What isn't in the cards is in the heart.