Augury
BY ROBERT LYNN
I wasn’t afraid of water until I began
to carry this phone all the time,
like my grandfather did the secret
revealed at his funeral. Best time
to meet you is just after the storm
stops, the beaches still empty
as wood stoves in August—
before anyone’s thought to squint
at puddles out the window to ask
if the rain has given up. Whenever
it’s like this a kestrel shelters
on what’s left of my windowsill.
Wet feathers look so much like
your hair coming fresh off a swim.
In the receiving line a stranger
in a walker held my hand and cried
how she loved him. We had many
late nights, though I shouldn’t talk.
But she couldn’t stop herself—who can?—
so she repeated it again and again
until discretion was a boutonnière
on the dead. I tried not to look
at my grandmother, sobbing perhaps
for a different reason. As a child, I loved
to take refuge from a downpour in the deep
end of the pool. Practiced hiding
from something by immersing myself in it.
I shouldn’t talk. The Romans watched
birds to understand the future
though now we do it just because
we like it, the way morning’s
discretion retreats from the past.
