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Modes of Divination

The future’s course, in all of its essentials,
Is augured from a steaming heap of entrails.

The tea leaves, buoyed by meniscus,
Will show you where the greatest risk is.

For aging hippies, using the I Ching.
Is probably a nearly perfect thing.

Astrologers are confident your sign
Determines how you’ll fit the Grand Design.

A disconcerting fact is that Tarot
Will tell you things you do not want to know.

Plucking random verses from the Bible
Doesn’t guarantee your soul’s survival.

A claim the future on a palm is etched
To most clear-headed persons seems far-fetched.

Some whale bones, sailors say, will do the trick,
As long as one is chasing Moby Dick.

The information gathered by a pollster
Is more erratic than a roller coaster.

Prognosticators who resort to Science
Will more than likely satisfy their clients.

.

.

Note to Self

You only have so many days
_To mend your errant ways,
But if the truth I now must tell,
_You like them very well

Just as they are and how they’ve been
_For years: replete with sin
And indiscreet entanglements
_That call for recompense

To injured parties. After all,
_It isn’t hard to fall,
And I have lots of empathy
_With reprobates like me

Who revel in their past mistakes
_And do whate’er it takes
To always keep repeating them.
_If life’s a fragile stem

That bears a single sterile flower
_Which lasts for but an hour,
It is because you have no plan
_To be the better man

Your mentors raised you up to be,
_And it’s a certainty
The day will come when you shall mourn
_The virtues you’ve forsworn.

.

.

C.B. Anderson was the longtime gardener for the PBS television series, The Victory Garden.  Hundreds of his poems have appeared in scores of print and electronic journals out of North America, Great Britain, Ireland, Austria, Australia and India.  His collection, Mortal Soup and the Blue Yonder was published in 2013 by White Violet Press.

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3 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    I had to laugh at science being included with divination. The note to self including being a reprobate who eventually realizes the past has caught up to him/her is so true.

    Reply
  2. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    I just love the unflinching honesty of these fictive delights… if that makes any sense to you at all, C.B. Your poetic declarations make an awful lot of sense to me, and for that, I thank you,

    Reply
  3. Joseph S. Salemi

    There are so many forms of divination and prophecy that the notion seems to be a universal, and embedded in the collective thinking of every race and culture. Kip did not mention Roman augury through the flights of birds, or the ancient Germanic method of noting the strength and directions of the wind, or the Greek use of the Delphic Oracle, or the Sortes Vergilianae, using the text of the Aeneid. But a poem can’t be too long.

    As for “Notes to Self,” I suppose all of us have bad habits that we’d rather keep (like a comfortable old easy chair) than break.

    Reply

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