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Three Poems
by Michelle Detorie


Hieromancy  
(Divination by observing objects offered in sacrifice)

The nuns
Who fed me
Wore gowns sewn with moss
They fed their fingers to the clam
They laid their bones — their hair —
Along the banks of the creek
Steaming in winter

The bats, like me
Sought the darkness within their abbey
Even when the townspeople called them
“Winged rats,” the nuns still cared
For them, carving bits of themselves
To leave below their roosts —

Chips of bone and bread, unleavened

Orniscopy  
(divination by observing birds)

The crows for whom
the black bowls of February beckon —
even now — three months off — the gray
months beckon, unfolding their twenty-eight wings
like moths. It is the month of lost
brothers. The month when their eyes
and teeth and hair shine out from within
the bark of the maples, soon to leaf out
into green fronds lined along their limbs
like slender green combs
along the edge of the pond.
From below the birds, there is
a sort of calm — a slow motion shot
of a child falling
who we know is only jumping
on a trampoline. Crows too, they fall
like the seabirds singing their way down —
bone bird body like a needle lacing
its way across — fish swimming parallel.
It is the least we can do — to see them —
acknowledge them (our brothers) — press
our faces — dull moons— close
to their skin and inhale
their pallor — the sweet smell of pollen —
dust of particular souls — before they are born.


Cyclomancy  
(divination by observing a turning wheel)

A turning gear, here in her belly — a moist place
where the finger spokes twirl the eggs like spun
sugar — sweet and pink. The tongue too like
a little wheel turning over inside the mouth —
grooming itself. Cyclone cylinder of wind — tunnel
of divination — a means through which the sky
can learn the ground — can drink it in. Tunnel
to her belly — a bowl of red — a hollow howl
waiting. In the air, debris spells out what was once
a house, once a field newly tilled, once a tree rooted
near the yellow shed. Like bats swimming up
out of their cave to surface in the night wheel, the
black
scraps in the wind sing and scatter round the
smoke-green
funnel. And though the storm leaves marks — a zigzag
script
like a tire's track, the wind snaps back to blue.
The earth calms and goes back to being round.
The eggs are warm and gleaming;
their shell bones polished and new.