Superstition

We couldn’t see the picture until after it was painted,
or the mirror until our hair had frozen. We couldn’t walk
after dark, the graves so close together, who knew
how their legs lay, what word lay on the tips of their tongues.

Years ago in the blue house on Laurel Hill Lane,
the young girl couldn’t breathe right. We caught a trout,
alive and gasping, and we held its head in her mouth,
the two of them desperate in their eyes. When we let the trout go

we knew it had swallowed some of the girl’s pain
because it surfaced so often, coughing. There are two ways
to keep track of what happened: at night, if you turn the air
to stone you will know what moves. In daylight,

wear hands where your hands would be, breathe
what leaves you. Whatever you do
turns, the omens pin you to your table, your favorite chair:
at last someone has named each vine, each mouth, each trout.