I’ve been trying to write a poem about a palm reader for three years and nine months. Actually, I’ve been working on the poem itself for about a week but the particulars about the palm reader and her predictions have been swirling in my head since July 2008. The palm reader was the (late) poet Lucille Clifton, and the setting was the weeklong poetry workshop at Squaw Valley.

I was fortunate enough to be a student of Lucille’s when I attended Columbia U. in New York the decade before. She was a wonderful teacher and I learned so much from her in those short two years. She and I both left New York in the summer of 1996 and had lost touch over the years, but then I was blessed with the happy surprise of having her as a teacher in Squaw Valley.

Lucille died several months after she read my hands. I remember her often and miss her. I also think back to the very last thing she said to me when the workshop was over and I was heading home: “Don’t worry, Devi. We’ll see each other again, soon.” It was the only thing she ever said to me that has turned out to be false.

Here is the poem:

 

Palms chanting fire

“You have a complicated hand.” – Lucille Clifton, July 2008, Squaw Valley, CA

 

I.

I knew the things about her that everyone knew,

how she was born, the extra finger that her family

 

took as a curse and how they cut it off; she wrote

these things and even spoke of them easily,

 

her words a steady trickle of a stream flowing

to my ears that were once a river but now a dam.

 

She grew up and the poems step-laddered her

from one place to another until she was at the head

 

of our table in a room with no ceiling save

the sky that was as cloudy as her eyes that day.

 

I had written a poem about Calypso —

after I read it aloud she smiled, called

 

me a showoff and said, off-hand, she read palms

and would have loved to have read

 

the hands of Odysseus.

I was the first in line when class was over,

 

insisting that she forego the coming meal

and hold my hands in hers instead. She read

 

my palms but not in the usual way people

read, no tell-tale trace of the hand with the index

 

finger, no patented assurances. She held both

hands, smoothed her palms over them, mirroring mine.

 

She was never one to wince over words or mince

or parse,  there was no cooking in her language,

 

but some regret in her voice that I wouldn’t hear

what she was saying to me,  for years to come;

 

that maybe I’d even forget the words she delivered.

That maybe I wasn’t listening.

II

 

The fear is exactly

like the feeling

that comes after

you see a lack

of recognition

in your ex-lover’s

face, as if you never

cradled his face in

your hands, as if

you never held hands.

 

III

There would be some good days, she said, looking over the deep creases in my palm, and there would be many days where the sun would not shine, and the despair would perfume the summer air; there would be days when no hands would reach out, and other days when most hands would pull back; there would be days where hands would grab and days those hands would praise and days that hands would stroke and hands would scold and my hands would, in response, cook and weep blood after picking up the pieces of shattered glass.

 

IV.

Complicated, she said. The hands that were pushing me under the water were the same hands that would be lifting me up. The hands that turned down the heat were the same hands that tugged at the hem and that some of these hands would remain unadorned and some of these hands had veins that rose to just below the surface of the skin and some of these hands were covered in rings and some of these hands were covered in tattoos and frequently, these hands would be covered in cheap ink, reminders written on the hand, that were soon washed off and then forgotten.

 

V.

I was the kind of girl who could

do so many things with my hands,

she said, her breath shallower,

 

her eyes narrowing with fatigue,

but my problem was that I was failing

to use my hands to tell time or keep it.

 

Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and is working on a couple of novels.