Divination

All those ways we have of knowing,

how divine: eggs and axes and lumps

on the head, wax settling on water,

yarrow sticks tossed in China,

visions in mirrors, smoke, and whispered

words from shells or words spelled

through the Ouija board, which told

someone like Roman Emperor Valens what, exactly?

All that scrying to discover war or pillage

or poison, to find out that the end

would come, would come no matter,

and the old dowsers who stagger with their twitching

ash or willow forks already know that.

My astrologer tells me my husband’s taken over

my reading—that our trouble with water,

any trouble with water is his

and that sometimes a reading becomes a premonition—

all this over the phone, and she also tells me

monkeys break into her house,

and illegal immigrants too, who eat her peanut butter,

set off the echoing halo of alarm.

Wouldn’t you, too, not understand today

if you could look into some space beyond? She was a gift

from a friend for my birthday,

one who might have let slip the flooding.

The finding is in the everyday and not in albino

pigeons or some kind of eclipse. But who could wear

emergency every day, the sharp cymbal

of swift error? That the things we touch know

us and our trouble, our loss.

Like my husband’s ex-mother-in-law who cursed him

with Jesus—praying that he and the ex would never

be happy with anyone except each other.

Then there was a Chinese woman in the mall who charged,

speaking a fast language of accusation. She pointed

at our daughter’s gypsy looks, then at me, blonde and fair.

Then there’s a feeling I cannot write out for fear

that on the page it will come true.

And we do have trouble with water—

trouble crossing it, water bills, water meters, leaks, floods.

The astrologer keeps asking, trying to find the chart

my husband interrupted. Fire, which is me, is surrounded

by air she says—him, our daughter, my mother. And the water

that he brings in. I’m an island of fire, she explains.

After two a.m., two houses up, I can see our neighbors.

What’s their curse? And would they be able

to name it before they’re told? Fire

came through, and their house had to be rebuilt.

They are outside too. I can see the burn

of candles past the brown sheers that hang

on their front porch. She holds scissors

because she’s cutting his hair. He sits shirtless,

and her legs are bare in the heat. I can predict

the pattern of hair that rings him—little crisscrosses

to be read before the broom or the wind, little piles

of straw so light they are almost imagined.