Two Photographs
July 5, 2023In An Album
July 5, 2023The Death of a Psychic
The obituary in the L.A. Times says that you foresaw
your own death, also a boy, dead, in a storm drain
with the wrong shoes on the wrong feet. Death
became your specialty: a yellow shirt, the flung
corsage near, vaguely, water, the odd detail drawing
squad cars and ambulance to the scene you dreaded.
I imagine nightmares that you woke up to instead
of from, the heavy winter coat of prophecy that hung
from your shoulders any season, especially summer
when mayhem bloomed below a bleeding sun
and dark angels, gorged on smog and heat, unfurled
their wings to wake you gasping in your dampened bed,
again, once more. No theophanies, no “still small voice”
or hovering dove, but only gray, murky hunches
bubbling from the mud of intuition, the sudden starts
and flights of vision, and of course, its shadow, fear.
But to live haunted by the knowledge of a certain year
when you would stumble in your flannel houserobe
through a sunlit kitchen and lie down on cold linoleum
beneath, at last, the wide wings of the present tense.