For most of my life I’ve been right

about omens. Salt, ravens. Red skies at morning.

Rocks thrown against the wind. A six

pack ring found in the vicinity of a sparrow’s nest

suggests three loves before marriage. A robin’s egg: split

ends. Stones skipped over an oil-slicked lake are lucky—luckier

still by an evening bonfire, flame

licking the corner of a clamshell

punnet of strawberries. To be born

on uranium-rich soil is to say something about granite, sunflowers,

polymer. The transfiguration of telluric into human

object. A prophecy is only as good as its seer, and no witness

is ever on time.
Today I was divining the melt point of a bulk bag:

the heat required to spur an entanglement of matter, amalgam

of polypropylene and Fukushima soil. The time it takes to write

radiance into rock. What remains

after passing is plastiglomerate, pressure, and the cascade

that rots caesium to barium. What departs is various.

It was many years ago, now, when a stone was just a stone.