Foretelling

I saw a commercial for an app that lifts 
the lines from your palm, a kind of weird 

spider web that then pulverizes into 
digital dust. The premise: each mote 

corresponds to a point in your lifeline—
to tell you how you'll lose your friends, 

your loves, your fortune; or conversely, 
how you'll make them. Believe it or not, 

some people have already paid for 
their fingerprints to be stored thus 

in some unseen archive passing itself off 
as pocket fortune teller, sidekick, seer. 

We say we'd love to know more about 
the hazy future, as though the signs

were not already popping up overnight
like billboards along the expressway—

to the west, the smudge of recent fires 
and the fading char of trees; in the south, 

damp lines marking how high the waters 
rose before receding into the plains. 

You don't need to be taught what the heart
anticipates of alternating swells of joy and

grief, days of sun, hail, or sleet—those scenes
in the fresco rising to the torch in your hand.