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.
