At a university women's sort of charity fair,

With book-tables, and candy and greeting cards,

Where nobody knew me, and what I was doing there

I can't think now, a woman with fortune-cards

Told fortunes. Who doesn't like it? I always do.

I crossed her palm with fifty cents for the fund

For daughters of missionaries to Tierra del Fuego.

She decoded the cards, she read lines in my hand,

And said, "I see great happiness for you soon.

I see your life," she said, "moving in love

Among many who love you. What you fear is gone.

I see rewards you do not know you deserve.

You write. You will write beyond your secret hope.

You have children. All will be well with them,"

She said. I gave her money again. "Stop! Stop!"

I said. "Tell me the terrible truth of my palm,

The furrows of grief, the clatter of calamity,

Time's roof crashing, my very home my doom,

My poison myself." The woman looked at me,

Costumed, but my kind, our speech the same,

Was not a gypsy, of course, some college man's wife

Like my wife, telling fortunes, a stranger, too.

Tell me," I said, "that nothing I do is safe,

That I must fail, must be destroyed, must die

In darkness crying out Mother, and die unheard.

Tell me the worst after worst, what will be taken

From me, and what taken after that, what feared

The most, and found out, and I on that broken."

She said, "Nothing will be taken. You walk in light.

Your cry is heard. Your mornings remember yesterdays

Of peace, and close with you come, early and late,

Of the unseparated in your love, these, these."

Who was she, nobody, everyone, so sure about this?

Fortune, a mirror, your own hand, yourself, she said.

But I was saying it, it was in my mouth a noise

As if I had been dead, and now was not dead.