“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.

An immature Red-Tail Hawk
magnificent in its rawness
lands in my backyard,
from brown to white to cinnamon-red,
fierce as a Harpy Eagle,
between myth and reality,
youth and adulthood,
its exuberance and power
on the precipice of flight,
wingspan casting a shadow
and the earth falling back.

I was lucky to have visited the Bar Mazzara,
in Palermo, Sicily. The year was 1995,
and because I loved Lampedusa
my cousin brought me to the Prince’s favourite bar.
There, I reached through the glass.
I touched an older world, the coffee like a vapour
that woke me to a dream that was real.

The bar closed in 2014, bought by a conglomerate.
Like anything in time, everything must change,
even the Bar Mazzara, the Lair of the Leopard,
at which Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
would sit, write, and sip his espressos,
trying to hold time in a porcelain cup,
even though in literature or in business,
loss alone is the constant clause in any contract.

Put out a hummingbird feeder,
become a gardener of the air.
One day a flower will bloom—
a hummingbird flower
made up of different species,
so alive it must vanish quickly,
though for a moment it hovers,
glimmers—
an iridescent flower of the heavens
piercing disbelief itself.