A Walk With the Seer

He explained his treatise 
as if fashioning an elixir. 
His boots were tattered, 
his vest awry. Too many nights 
adrift on a settee in the estuaries 
of thought? I pointed 
to the femur in the grass. 
He glared as if I'd committed
an offense. His eyes 
were emeralds crushed 
under tons of soil. 
They glimmered with pain 
and distance. He navigated 
the terrain with great aplomb.
I tried to keep up
but his axioms were obscure: 
“The rain-soaked lynx 
on the island of misgiving
feasts only on the leaves 
of the poplar.” He gestured,
as if conducting an invisible
orchestra. I didn’t inquire 
about the nomad in the fable 
though his quandary 
had plagued me for days. 
Should he attend to 
the flickering filament
or embark post haste
for Brussels? I had no idea.
I dragged an aster bough
from the thinker’s path.
He didn’t seem to notice 
as he questioned the right
of bells to exist
and critiqued the odor of mulch. 
When we stopped for lunch, 
I nibbled my lettuce 
as he gnawed his cold sirloin.
He described the coin
he’d seen in a dream.
It depicted the profile 
of a man. Then it became 
an urchin in a gulch 
inspecting the wreckage 
of a plane. Mudlarks 
labored as far as the eye 
could see. A scab-speckled boy 
listlessly stoked a forge. 
The seer paused and set 
his gaze to the horizon, 
which was blue and clear 
and heavenly. “We must brace 
for the storm,” he said.