Palmistry Fantasia

There, the pasteboard and neon hand!
Just past the interchange by the bowling alley.
The one with silver rockets, small green stars,
and a trail of red comets flashing through the smog.

It’s still here, the hand
held up in greeting or command.
“Halt!” it says, or
“Peace be with you, brother,”
while the map across its palm
traces excursions into blue trees,
green skies, and mushroom-colored lives.

Blue dun is the color of its neon,
the same as the throat feathers of a teal
scudding over the marshes of Merced.
It matches the purple mascara the gypsy woman wears,
matches the pools of velvet-blue darkness in her eyes.

Her name is Alma Josephina,
and she designed the sign herself,
imitating the figure of her own hand,
the neon indicative of its natural aura.

That was twenty years ago
when Eisenhower was President
and all her customers wore pedal pushers
or Bermudas, and never noticed
the fireflies in the marshes at night.

*

You’re Oriental, aren’t you?
Can you read tea leaves?
I tried to once, years ago,
had a Chinese woman teaching me,
but her fees were too steep.

I like a joke.
It loosens up the customers.

Well, come here towards the light.
Let me get a good look
at the ghosts in the grave of your palm.
They’re there, you know.
All the people you’ve ever been,
all the trips you’ve taken
and the towns you’ve settled in,
back before the birth of Christ,
back before people were people,
before this paw was a hand.

You see? The whole palm glows
like purple mist over a cemetery.
Move closer. Clamp it around the glass.
See it flare on the inside?
That’s the light your bones make,
not the crystal at all.

Look at your hand now.
You can see yourself dancing
on the heel just above the wrist.
You must be a happy man.
You’ll be born again and again,
get to the threshold of Heaven,
never enter but keep coming back,
here, for fun, for friends,
until this will be Paradise,
and Paradise just an old resort
the highway’s passed by.

Well, have a nice trip.
You’ll make it yet.
Says so right in that curvy line
around the Mound of Venus,
that thumbstump there,
right where the long straight line
cuts across like an interstate.