HOME /  Poem :  A weekly poem, read by the author.

Augury

Listen to Ellen Wehle reading this poem. Laugh if you want, when the fortune teller told me to "take a new road" I took her at her word, turned a block from home and found it waiting: gabled night, the secret trees spilling darkness around streetlights, blown roses singing hosannas over a fence.

Don't get me wrong, nothing was solved.

I walked, a cat cried at my passing,
grave old oaks
watched. I knew myself
not. Say, How can we help it—this waterwheel
of our days, each day a bucket
bound in copper rings and dripping, each
bucket a hand, cupping sky?
Who knows what

I knew. Moon open as a gate.

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Ellen Wehle's book of poems is The Ocean Liner's Wake. She lives outside Chicago and is completing her first novel.

Clickhere to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.To submit poetry to Slate, send up to five poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215.