Hippomancy

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divination by means of observing the movements and sounds of horses

Nothing describes the verdant science of your ribs. Yesterday, the shaman spat in small orbits before you, examining traces of buttercup, courtyard sun splashes, roadside places confessed onto gravel. You have learned to die without confusion. Brazen lovers reside in your barrel. Tilted wood. Seed sprouts your mane. When you climb unseen out of twilight. When your underside reflects, she, who you imagined, clips a wisp of hair from the long surface of your crest. Who sold you for this caress and a cup of water.

Chakra kissed, shy, you buckle. The panic of the whip, faded. Almost bright shoots of wheat fallow. Night dry, before there is dream, the sheen of the bride’s farewell travels into the sallow star between your ears.

Abacomancy

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divination by means of reading patterns in dust

You killed her in her sleep.   Soon you too breathed in the space of indefinite scaffold.   She drew a circle around you.   Handed you a stone.   Quail in the sagebrush: unfettered.   Verbena grew over the door.   A canopy of sycamores studied the haze among a cumulus of seeds.   Sun muted, soft in the voice, she slipped into the variant wonder of loss. Dust falls from the envelope. The entire vocation of love swells. A profusion of charms shimmer under the pinyon. Thistle covers the windows.   Intaglio surface of glass—ghost, who might you be among.   Lost one. You wished her and you wished her.

Enoptromancy

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divination by means of using a shiny surface placed in water to foretell the recovery or death of someone

At dusk begins the season’s final harvest,  a time for slaughter, for preparing stores of meat and grain to last through the coming winter.       At the feast, I set a place for the dead. Cold stars languish under my crane-skin dress.   The silk foliage of false oak appears unraveled. I, she who is.   Sleep, snow’s mechanism.   Hornet’s nest kept in her hair’s gust.   Inexplicable speech.   Moth green light over the meadow.   I am held in the residue and ascetic disaffiliation.   Thou eyes old thirst lowers at last.     Mother disappears.   But here I speak to her.

*

You tell me a woman stands ultraviolet among the rhododendron.   You tell me two times the water.   Three times the sun.   You tell me Le Conte’s sparrow does not attack the larva of a tussock moth.   Vicissitudes white daisies aflame her brown streaked breasts divide the mirror.

Gyromancy

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divination by means of going in circles

So you go wither.   So muscled in foxglove.   So the surface of passionflower’s scent known to the lungs will be touched by the mouth.   So a camera’s song leans over the guardrail.   So the graffiti of circles.   So lexicon is devoured by chalk in the grassland.   So omega.   So bilge.   So yesterday the tradition of order was left to the entangled hawfinch.   So I refused.   So I am not a lady.     Not your supper jug. Your hunt of her. So dumpling, who is your fried chicken. Even in neon-fragment.     Even in mastic-erotic-red.   Your taste of me is dispensed. So inconsolable keystrokes do not withdraw from honesty, as honesty is in itself inconsolable.

So found I was without you.   I do not remember how you left. Transparent, history steeped in your head. So I held my finger the small blossoms of your eyelids.   So I told the sun to go. And there it spread. So flagstone.   So eaglet.

Sciomancy

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divination by means of communication with shades of the dead

The terebinth tree releases too late; moira chemise spills through the boughs. A goodwill coat closets the white serge, Swiss-dots, shade spurts in the silent palate of owl moss. I saw my love walking in the field. He lay down among the spinifex. Our post-coitial vows trespass the private pines. Less hot the rain drones among the spruce. I hear him. His tinseled mirth of leaves carpet his uncarpeted house.