Backyard Augur

You prayed for clearer signs, and—how she seems
to nourish the dark heft of prophecy

like a clutch of spotted eggs within her,
this turtle with her somnambulist’s eye,

inspired and mud-ringed, her great crusted beak,
who transfixes you there on the sidewalk

as she goes lumbering pondside, silent
and summer-slow, down. Rain wrings other worlds,

the earthworms’ livid kingdoms, from the soil.
How you’ve longed to light on the arcanum

of what’s after, as surely as she has,
to pierce its soft shell and pick it apart,

menacingly, and to know, as she must,
how your grandfather’s zinnias still spring,

sunning their colors in strangers’ gardens,
or to apprehend, sweetly as she does,

the aery language of the meadow lark,
whose voice your mother loved and then became.

You’d ask her, this turtle, but for the tongue
you lack, what to make of the cottonwood

that lightning licked and splintered, tallest tree
on your street, recalling the riven trunk

you strung an arm through, that it did not fall
toward the house. You pray for clearer signs.