Old man Wisteria (fortune teller)
saved stones, red sealed envelopes
inside claw-foot bathtub, and bones
from his dinner. He cast them in dirt
then burned to soot, taking the ashes
& marking a line across the apartment
where the demons were supposed to stay.
Old man Wisteria’s wife (a psychic) died
ten years ago. Since then, the neighbourhood
cats claw at his door, worse than a minotaur
in a maze. He waits. Come morning, he empties
the tub full of black letters that fall off the page
(his eyes are bad in his old age, he only sees
the future in a house of bones & knows he doesn’t
have long in his apartment anymore). He stacks
the paper into the cracks of the doors and windows.
He waits, again, for morning.
When the downstairs neighbour (the tea leave reader)
finds the body, months have passed. The old man’s mummified
to his chair, his stones and bones and empty letters
over his skin like a tattoo. Like a riddle for
a fortune he left behind.
The cats still come. A black one with a patch
of white over his eye–his third eye–in the shape of
wisteria is the loudest. The new owners (father & mythic son)
don’t know how to get the claw marks out of the doors
or how to throw away stones that turn up the window sill, tangled
with petals, red thread, and vines leaves, spinning
counter-clockwise out the frames.
The old man waits. And waits (as a spirit-self)
until morning. His future, now, always the same.
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