House of Cards by Evelyn Deshane
My uncle takes the cards out
from bottom wardrobe door.
His wife in the kitchen
hair tied back like Baba Yaga
& holding root vegetables
like forgotten children.
Uncle spreads the cards like extended fingers
split from a mandrake plant
slices the deck down the middle
and holds one out to me:
“Your legacy’s in the numbers;
in seven of cups and ace of pentacles
in the wheel of fortune
& the devil (Capricorn)
like the early January blessing
of snowfall on your birth.”
My parents never came home
one night in midsummer.
A tree split down the middle
as if it was the tower
cars wheels spinning like disks
&blood like a magicians cloth
over pavement. I was an
orphan. A child of legend,
a page of suffering until
potato soup kept me warm
and more birthdays passed in winter.
My uncle builds a house of cards
one by one, bent at the edges
a jester a king a queen
upon aces and aces
then he blows like the wind
like frost giants
like Loki and the Stregas of the forest
& everything falls down again.
Everything always falls down again.
“Your future’s in black water,” he says
as he builds and bends and builds again.
“Obscured until the next night
when the star chases the moon
and the sun opens up to the world,
endlessly repeating itself
like a spell.”
My aunt gives me
more soup made from stones
until I can cast runes at the bottom
& build my way up from here.
Picture By Mikhail Vrubel – The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160306
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