The palm reader, garbed in a cascaded Romani dress,
red headscarf & golden hoop earrings, took my tired

hands in hers. She whispered, my dress suggests I am
pure, I’m free of illusion &, with your spirit-trust, I’ll see the

trails leading into you. Into all you hide from. I’d found
her accidently, off an old road w/ moss-tongued trees

& a few junked cars, rundown & lost. Two dogs, their
soiled faces peering through fence slots, & a wet garden

of vegetables hard-hit by nibbling rabbits & whitetail deer.
I was a man of blackened branches, looking for what

might have moved in me, had I willed it or wished it so.
She leaned close to me, felt the flexure lines of my hand,

those deltas of tension – longing, remorse, yearning, hurt –
& said that the hand is an un-funneled richness until we,

w/ in a life, create paths upon it that our imagination –
as a genie – creates its freedom & its hard bondage in,

&, by & by, we arrive at it, this truth, like a stunned doe.
She said, you are confined to an imaginary paradise,

& the joy of your dreams – look here, she pointed – runs
along this papillary ridge, your fingertip, where you

touch your wife’s face as she sleeps. & the greater
danger you face – always – is when you hold someone,

her, more than you hold the effort of attention it requires
to love all that must incarnate between you, your fates.

The rabbit & deer, you know, she said, do not try to
possess things. They eat the leaves w/ out naming them.

– Ken Meisel

Author’s Note: This poem notices the profound pleasure and the inevitable human price we experience when we attach to someone. We gain belongingness and connection and we lose it via the impermanence of human life. To attach a name to someone is to imbue them with symbolic meaning. The personalized naming is the ego’s form of benevolent trickery; it marks and signifies another, and the senses mobilize to attach to the sensory-symbolic value intrinsic to the name – which is a form of reification. Such is the stickiness of language and meaning. To learn to relax in this paradoxical tension is to become attentive to the free will, the fate and the ultimate destiny of another, which is to practice non-interruption and non-possession in the freedom of another’s life course. At its core, the poem invites us to accept the paradox of belongingness and loss. And to do so in the value of non-possession.