My Psychic

has a giant hand
            diagrammed in front of her place
on West Tennessee.
            It towers above a kudzu hill as if
      to offer a cosmic How!
                  as in Hello! from a long
way off, as in how

she already knows
            the sundry screwed up ways a day
can go days before
            I park my wreck on the hill again beside
      her white Mercedes. O
                  little slice of Lebanon!
O cedar scented

cards fanned like feathers
            of a Byzantine peacock! Tell
me again how I
            might have been a fine lawyer, that I'll raise
      four kids in Tallahassee, how
                  I married—it's true—on
my lunch break—Yez

she took you to lunch
            okay a zeven year lunch ha ha!
Incense. Mini-shrine.
            A wagon train of chihuahuas snoozing by
      her slippers. You have anxious
                  about a future... I do. But
lately I've grown cold,

unconsoled by her
            extrasensory view. I think
—no need to speak—across
            the black tabletop, I don't want to know
      if I'll find a bright city,
                  a room by the river, a love
I will recognize

by her dragonfly
            tattoo. O narrative of ether!
O non-refundable
            life facts! say that what happens may not matter,
      or that it matters as any
                  story does when two fresh lovers
embrace the old pact

(her bra on the chair,
            his socks in the kitchen) that says
their love is level,
            unfabled, new. Level with me, tell me why
      the dogs on the floor, little
                  moon-fed hounds of Delphi, seem
so over it, so

done with the fleas of
            destiny. Maybe that's the right
attitude, no need
            to ask why I'm here on a perfectly blue
      Friday, content with
                  what the thin air, what the dust
motes in the light say

near the high window. I
            should've learned that music long ago—
O soundless number!
            O jukebox of being that the dogs dream to! No
      faux crystal ball, no tea leaves
                  or terrace in the nether
reaches of my palm

will make her answers
            less like hocus-pocus in a purchased dark.
It's time to pay, to drive away
            from telepathic altitudes, to say adieu
      to why love ends. How
                  a heart opens again. Why
anything is true.

Copyright © 2006 James Kimbrell All rights reserved
from My Psychic
Sarabande Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission