“The diamond is the cornerstone of the wise, proof against the blows of fate.”
(Anonymous alchemical text, c. 1600)

Is something good to come or something amiss?
I pick the card up from the woodland path
and stand in the shadows of the trees
holding a playing card like a bemused polymath.
Why here, now, out of fifty-one companions,
does this small sign arrive in my hand?
And as I studied the diamonds in their mine
the ground beneath me changed—
paving stones as in an old church,
a choir filling the air with unbroken sound.
I knew then, in that crossing of worlds,
I had stepped onto my cornerstone;
nothing in our strange lives is mere incidence.
I lift my door card, four of diamonds,
and place my bet on the given and the unknown.