AUGURY

      Inside the camera obscura,

      a cloud,

      Or the image of a cloud, grows darker.

      The past warps, curls back round to touch the present.

      Is it the spit and clay on the blind man’s eyes

      Or the little spell of words that returns sight?

      Look, they said.

      So I looked. But I saw nothing.

      A book of moths. A book of sand.

      A book of stones unstitched from the wolf’s belly.

      Shot through with light,

      a book of blank pages.

      The solution embodies yet keeps hidden

      All dissolved within it,

      keeps the hermetic

      Hemmed in, the secret secret a bit longer.

      The Geiger counter’s tick-tick like an old clock’s.

      Foreign voices on the shortwave, static

      Like a mother’s shush,

      like crushed salt through a sieve.

      The past waits unmoved:

      a rusted wrecking ball

      In a vacant lot: a scoured erratic

      Set down by a glacier—out of place, useless.

      A book of nuance that resists closure.

      Book of Desire.

       Book of the Vertigo of Desire.

      Book in which the whole is latent in the partial.

      Rooks roost in the quarry cliffs; goldfinches

      Flit and dart. Water long concealed in shadowed cisterns

      Takes on a ferrous edge.

      Look, they said.