Haruspex

I crouch on grass with wet denim knees,
smoke in my eyes and a cat-scratched throat,
hands cupping the air around a fallen form:

          brown and speckled white
          girl bird with entrails as tangled as yarn
          spilling from her center,
          feeding the spent earth beneath

This ancient practice: predicting the future
in another’s prone body is as familiar
as a lover’s sigh or a mother’s crooning song

Inside the house: a dripping faucet, a humming fridge,
the ceaselessly reproducing dishes,
and another day of anxious contemplation

I want to see anything but this inevitable march
           to stillness:
           the calendar stuck on a single immaterial square

When can we return, if not to our better selves
then to our diverted ones?

I call into the space
           where a heart once was

                     and hear my own lonely voice

 

Source: Poetry (October 2021)