A word I have always loved since I first stumbled across it at twelve years old; meaning ‘the interpretation of omens or signs’, a word that lives in parallel to another favorite of mine: ‘auspices’ meaning the ‘interpretations made from the flight of birds’. The way we are always, no matter our outer professions of logical thought, looking for intimate indications, for annunciations or for clues as to where we should go or how we should be. The sense, unearthed in this poem is that in the end we too, become auguries and auspices for others, and beneath even that, an understanding of the depth of that responsibility.
AUGURIES They have happened all your life, the bird tapping at the dawn window with that message from your mother, telling you through a half sleep, you were living in a strange new parallel, both on your own, and accompanied now, along ways you could only begin to imagine. They have happened by night with or without your seeing or knowing, all the stars turning above you round the fixed true north where you slept, and you at the center of every turning, dying through all the layers of your dreaming, to find yourself, each morning, through all the creative undoing and drama, nested at the heart of the pattern. They have happened in every first glimpse through a light-filled afternoon window, needing only the briefest look into the heavens, grey or blue, to see clouds spilling across an open sky, all come to find you, all wanting to make themselves familiar and understood, the race of constellating shapes, clouds or passing crowds of faces now beckoning, now warning you off, now inviting you in again. The intuition that every outer pattern, dark or light can find its center in some inner incomprehensible origin of being, and the sense, living in this meeting between inner and outer of somehow always being implicated, always being seen, always being invited, and always in the end becoming in yourself an omen and a sign and a revelation, your own eyes lifted to the stars following an invisible road and the merest glimpse of your silhouette outlined against the evening sky, perhaps even now, beneath every confusion, a beckoning life that others could follow. from Still Possible
I'm ever on the watch for signs and, upon receiving them, find myself split into two parts. One part responds with amazement and cries: "You can't make this stuff up!" Another part marvels at the "coincidence" and wishes for something more definitive and specific. I like the first part better. (But I'd still like to receive something more definitive and specific.)
The best part of my life has been spent interpreting clouds....coming then going...no coming no going. Thank you David