Lifelines

by Deborah Pope

An expert told me that I have six planets
and four angels in my ninth house,
that my familiar is a bear and that I will create
a great work late in life. I have also been told
the lifeline in my palm is forked and my heart
line is broken. And a woman I knew could
recount her past lives in impressive detail.
She’d been male and female, child and crone,
a Sufi, an Aztec, a nun in the time of Assisi,
though in what order, she did not say.
I could almost believe my children were cats
or barbarians, my gentle husband once my mother.
I would like to have been a woman with a lute,
a weaver of sagas, or a girl who saw visions
in the fire, each existence a curious bead
in an abacus of mysterious tallies, and I regret
I know no other lives than this one.

For doesn’t something in all of us long to be
more than one character, to have more than one
story to tell? Who wouldn’t want to appeal to
some Mender of Destinies to let us step up on
the cosmic scale and spin an arrow of options,
especially if it could be weighted in our favor.
We might stop in the slot of a life where scores
are settled, debts paid, our virtue rewarded.
Or is our desire simply to believe we can go on
speaking in some, infinite, elastic theater of time,
keep our voice going, our words pushing back
with each spin against silence? Won’t that be
the hardest part when any life comes to its end
and leaves so much still to explain, forgive?
Can any one life ever finish it?