"Reading the Cup"/At the Staghorn Cafe
Yesterday--a cold rainy Saturday--found me snug inside the Staghorn Cafe in Greenfield (yet another Pittsburgh neighborhood), receiving a psychic reading.
Pittsburgh is a town of psychics as well as a town of writers. I believe that the two vocations are connected. Both utilize sensitivity to other people--the sympathetic curiosity that can lead to sudden revelations and flashes of insight--along with sensitivity to nature, the fluctuations in mood that changes in landscape and atmosphere can bring.
We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at (and interpreting) the stars.
I won this psychic reading in a raffle to raise funds for a timely and forthcoming poetry anthology, Nasty Women & Bad Hombres, edited by Greenfield writers Deena November and Nina Padolf. Nina did my reading. The Staghorn--a charming mixture of down home and New Age--is Deena and Nina's neighborhood hangout, workshop space, and reading venue, both psychic and literary.
Nina doesn't find lost objects or reveal winning lottery numbers. (Although I once paid for a psychic reading from a woman who worked lottery numbers into her nearly unintelligible patter, as she shuffled dingy old greeting cards on a bar-room table. Yes, I mean birthday and holiday cards, not the Tarot or a regular playing pack.)
This was a character reading, mixed with insights into my past and the people in it, along with a sense of what the coming year might bring to me. Rich and somehow comforting, like the cup of hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon that I was sipping.
Afterward, I walked out into the wet world feeling a lot warmer.
The Mediterranean in me has always been fascinated by such rituals. In Arab cultures, women "read" not tea leaves, but the patterns left in a cup of Arabic coffee. Here is a poem from my book Arab on Radar, "Reading the Cup":
Unfathomed, the deep blue sea
is black and bitter – Arabic coffee
boiled three times in a copper pot.
Drink to the silted grounds
in heart-scalding gulps.
Turn your cup over.
Fate will drip downward,
settling in cloud-negatives.
Believe me when I say:
I read what I see in the cup.
Rock, paper, scissors.
You will build a home,
receive the news you long for,
cut short your bad luck.
To scry is to be seer and sieve,
straining hope into each sign.
How else could we bear
to gaze into the dark?
Arab on Radar
P.S. ONE MORE WEEK TO ENTER THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAY for my new book, Under the Kaumann's Clock!
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is a town of psychics as well as a town of writers. I believe that the two vocations are connected. Both utilize sensitivity to other people--the sympathetic curiosity that can lead to sudden revelations and flashes of insight--along with sensitivity to nature, the fluctuations in mood that changes in landscape and atmosphere can bring.
We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at (and interpreting) the stars.
I won this psychic reading in a raffle to raise funds for a timely and forthcoming poetry anthology, Nasty Women & Bad Hombres, edited by Greenfield writers Deena November and Nina Padolf. Nina did my reading. The Staghorn--a charming mixture of down home and New Age--is Deena and Nina's neighborhood hangout, workshop space, and reading venue, both psychic and literary.
Nina doesn't find lost objects or reveal winning lottery numbers. (Although I once paid for a psychic reading from a woman who worked lottery numbers into her nearly unintelligible patter, as she shuffled dingy old greeting cards on a bar-room table. Yes, I mean birthday and holiday cards, not the Tarot or a regular playing pack.)
This was a character reading, mixed with insights into my past and the people in it, along with a sense of what the coming year might bring to me. Rich and somehow comforting, like the cup of hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon that I was sipping.
Afterward, I walked out into the wet world feeling a lot warmer.
The Mediterranean in me has always been fascinated by such rituals. In Arab cultures, women "read" not tea leaves, but the patterns left in a cup of Arabic coffee. Here is a poem from my book Arab on Radar, "Reading the Cup":
Unfathomed, the deep blue sea
is black and bitter – Arabic coffee
boiled three times in a copper pot.
Drink to the silted grounds
in heart-scalding gulps.
Turn your cup over.
Fate will drip downward,
settling in cloud-negatives.
Believe me when I say:
I read what I see in the cup.
Rock, paper, scissors.
You will build a home,
receive the news you long for,
cut short your bad luck.
To scry is to be seer and sieve,
straining hope into each sign.
How else could we bear
to gaze into the dark?
Arab on Radar
P.S. ONE MORE WEEK TO ENTER THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAY for my new book, Under the Kaumann's Clock!
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh
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