Photo credit: Steve Klepetar

Who built that pyramid?
she wants to know, 
looking out across the street 
where a mound of snow 
glows in lamplight. 
It’s just snow, I tell her, 
from clearing the parking lot. 
They pile it up like that 
when it gets so deep.
It does look kind of like 
a pyramid in that light, 
but it’s just a big heap of snow. 
That’s not snow, she says. 
Look, someone built 
that pyramid, and I want 
to know why. 
Snow reaches up,
inverted cone against 
a winter-stripped tree, 
its icy branches bobbing
in the light wind. 
She imagines strange rituals,
mummies in some secret 
chamber, grave goods 
scattered on the cold floor
and a good strong boat with oars
to row anxious souls into the underworld. 
                        

I took a cab from the hotel to the place 
on East Street, where the fortune teller sits 
in her small room. She doesn’t speak 
for a long time, then she tells me 
that my grave will be dug in a country 
far to the south. You will have many 
children, she says, but none of them 
will live past forty. You will have 
a library named after you, or maybe
a street. It’s not clear, but in any case, 
there will be books, more than you can 
ever read. Your team won’t win 
the World Series until it moves 
to a city on the plain. You will take 
up golf, you will swim a hundred laps. 
Your life will be filled with a wild 
attempt to breathe. She accepted 
payment in the form of old coins, 
which I found in a hole near the fence. 
I dug them up with a garden trowel 
and spent the morning washing off 
the dirt in the laundry sink. 
I am not a rich man exactly, but I get by. 
My mother says I am comfortable, 
my wife thinks we have too much cash. 
Soon it will be dark. I will walk home 
this time, hands in my pocket, whistling 
past the graveyard where my bones will never lie.