Poetry

Logomancy
by Craig Finlay

And still we defer to the position of planets as we’re born to tell us who we are. Never the world at hand. The proximity of maple or elm in the hospital courtyard, or if the clock in the delivery room ran slow. We were once wealthy in ways of divination. Ailuromancy—the movements of cats. Tasseomancy—reading tea leaves. Osteomancy—scattering the bones. Here are the few truths of which we’re still certain. If a boy is born at the moment a nearby stray cat births a litter in an alley, he will be father to half as many children. If a girl is born near a rooftop pigeon coop at the moment their elderly caretaker sets them loose, she will play such music as makes one believe in muses. If a baby is pulled into the world by the hands of someone who bears the same name as one of their ancestors, they will either become a weaver, or a collector of small, precious things, or both. I know why we look to the planets and constellations instead, when we find no life there. We’re anxious to find the way gravity hangs on us. To distill the cosmos down to something humans can speak. At the first calculation of the solstice, the universe blushed. Tentative fingers, discovering the way a body moves. Never have a child within sight of a jilted lover. She’ll grow to pull entire lives into the furnace of her wild, burning heart. Never have a child beneath a migration of monarchs, unless you want her to feel that pull to go there, always there, to the mountain beyond the mountain. Never have a child near trees being felled. She’ll someday step from a ledge or a high bridge, awash in all of the ways gravity pulls us home.