CARTOMANCY

Hear the barking dogs investigate the origin of shadows,
hear them tearing at the fabric of presage.
Listen. Something is advancing
and the woods crunch beneath your feet as if
you were fleeing without end and arriving without end.
You sealed the door with your name inscribed on
the ashes of yesterday and tomorrow.
But someone has arrived.
And other faces blow on you, the face in the mirrors
where you are nothing more than a shredded candle,
a moon invaded beneath the waters by triumphs
and combat,
by bracken.

Here is what you are, what you were, what is coming,
what may come.
Seven responses you have for seven questions.
Your chart bears witness that is the sign of the World.
At your right the Angel,
at your left the Demon.
Who calls? But who calls from your
birth until your death
with a broken key, with a ring
that was buried years ago?
Who glides above your own steps
like a flock of birds?
Stars illuminate the sky of enigma.
The more you want to see cannot be seen
face to face
because your light is of another realm.
And it’s still not your time. And there will be time.

What matters more is to decipher the name of who enters.
His chart is that of Madness, with his patient net
for hunting butterflies.

He is the eternal guest.
He is the hallucinated Emperor of the world that inhabits you.
Do not ask who he is. You know him
because you have searched for him under every stone
and in all the abysses
and together you’ve kept vigil over pure advent of the miracle:
a poem in which everything was all plus you
—something more than that whole—
But nothing has arrived.
Nothing more than these same sterile
words.
And it may be growing late.

Let’s see who sits.
She who is caught up in twine and caws
spins unspinning her sheet
has the black butterfly for a heart.
But your life is long and her chord will snap
very far away.
I read it in the sands of the Moon where
the journey is written,
where the house is drawn in which you sink
like a pale striation
in the night spun with great webs
by your weaver Death.
Be more cautious of water, love, and fire.

Beware of the love that stays.
Today, tomorrow, and after tomorrow.
Beware because he shines with a shine
of tears and swords.
His glory is of the Sun, much as his furies
and his pride.
But you will never know peace,
Because your Strength is the strength of torments
and Temperance cries with her face against the wall.
You will not sleep beside happiness,
because in all your steps there is an edge of mourning
that presages crime or goodbye,
and the Hanged Man announces to me the horrific night
that was destined for you.
Do you want to know who loves you?
He who departs at meeting me comes from your
own heart.
Masks of clay shine on your face, and beneath your skin
runs the pallor of all loneliness.
A courtship of lives and deaths came to live
in only one life.
He came to learn the horses, the trees, the stones,
and remained crying over every shame.
You lifted the wall that covers him, but without
your meaning to, the Tower closes him in:
a silken prison where love rattles
keys of the unbearable jailer.
Meanwhile the Chariot awaits the signal to leave:
the apparition of the day dressed as the Hermit.
But it’s not time yet to convert blood
into a memorial stone.
You are still lying in the constellation
of Lovers,
that river of fire that’s devouring the belt
of time that devours you,
and I daresay that both of you belong
to a race of shipwrecks that sank without salvation
and without consolation.

Cover yourself now with the breastplate of power or forgiveness,
as though you were unafraid,
because I’m going to show you who hates you.
Do you listen now to your heart beating like a shadowy wing?
Are you not watching with me for the arrival, bearing a dagger
of frost at your side?

She, the Empress with your broken dwellings,
she who melts your waxen image for sacrifices,
she who buries the dove in darkness to obscure the air in your house,
she who hobbles your steps with branches of a dead tree,
with waning fingernails, with words.
She wasn’t always the same, but whoever she may be
is the same,
anyway her power is nothing other than your other being.
Such is her sorcery.
And although the Croupier rolls the dice over
the table of your destiny,
and your enemy knots your name three times on the
adverse hemp,
there are at least five who know that the game
is in vain,
that her triumph is not triumph
but only a scepter of misfortune conferred upon
the uninhabited King,
an ossuary of dreams where the phantasm of love that doesn’t die wanders.

You’re going to stay in the dark, you’re going to stay alone.
You’re going to stay outside of your chest
to smite who kills you.

Do not invoke Justice. In his desert throne
the serpent was granted asylum.
Don’t try to find your talisman of fish bones,
because there is much night and much of your executioners.
His purple has muddied your thresholds
since dawn
and has marked three unlucky signs on your door
with swords, with gold and with clubs.
Within the circle of swords cruelty enclosed you.
With two disks of gold the deception of
scaly eyelids annihilated you.
Violence drew with his staff of clubs
a blue lightning bolt on your throat.
And above all tended for you the carpet of embers.
Behold the Kings have arrived.
They come to fulfil the prophecy.
They come to inhabit the three shadows of death
that will escort your death
until you stop spinning the Wheel of Fortune.