Knight of Wands

By Michael Parker October nineteenth. two-hundred-ninety-third day of the year. It’s Mercurii, and the waning Hunter moon sits by Orion’s stretched thigh. Hydra lifts her head out of its eastern hole (there, next to Orion’s foot), wanting to devour the cadmium-hued moon. What explains our struggles’ centrality? At night, we sit by the window waiting for our suffering to leave; the desolation of pain’s long war, and how that pain changes and consumes every single ounce of us. This just might be the answer. We have lost the guide star. The nights are all black and shadows, and we are bleak with a quotidian affinity for our very own insufferable violent solitude (because no one around us knows our pain). The days are crowned with the southern sun, glowing. If we walk, we’re crooked; slower than the wind. Aphids, like tiny-winged fairies, dance like heavy snowfall. God is soft spoken. The praying tree has been felled. Blood has come out on the leaves on the trees. And dry leaves fall away from their own beloved green communities. The Prince of the cards leaves his own Egypt. (Does he feel the terms: lone, exile, desolate?) I see he carries a long stick. I don’t want to believe it’s a weapon in this age of weapons. Rather, he holds it forward like a diviner’s rod. Divining a future? Divining life without the fear of increased pain (which chokes sufferers like ivy about the neck)? Yes, the angels seem to have lost us. Lost to us in our kingdoms of the unapproachable. Lost to us in their great and benevolent flight to minister to the forsaken living and the unburdened dead. Copyright © 2021 by Michael Parker. Originally published in the poetry collection, Diving the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush, by Michael Parker, published by the Utah State Poetry Society, 2021.