{"id":42254,"date":"2012-11-21T14:27:33","date_gmt":"2012-11-21T19:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=42254"},"modified":"2013-04-22T15:15:21","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T19:15:21","slug":"the-witch-and-the-poet-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/21\/the-witch-and-the-poet-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Witch and the Poet: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Toward the end of February, 1980, a witch told me I was a poet. This happened in the town of Galilee, in Rhode Island. Like the other Galilee, it was on the coast, and also like that Galilee, it was as good a place as any for a creation myth.<\/p>\n

I had to interview the witch for a newspaper my friend Allen edited at Brown. I don\u2019t know where he found the witch or why he lent me his car to go interview her. I was nineteen and hadn\u2019t written anything, though I claimed to \u201cwrite,\u201d as if writing were more a state of being than a practice. I got the assignment, I think, because Allen wanted to date me, even though I had no intention, ever, of going out with him. (Okay, I went once: a very cold winter picnic in a park at midnight, with blankets and a blindfold, but that was it. I suspected then that I wasn\u2019t just uninterested in Allen\u2014I was uninterested in picnicking with men in general\u2014but hadn\u2019t yet learned the vocabulary to explain what that meant, even to myself). When I went to see the witch I made my roommate Wendy go with me. No way was I going to see a witch alone at night.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Galilee was almost entirely deserted. So was Jerusalem, across the harbor. Really. Those are the actual names. Cottages with no lights, no cars in the driveways, no miracles. Galilee had the evacuated look of a minor summer community drifting toward spring. The road brought us to land\u2019s end. We had two options: we could turn left to the Block Island boat or right to the witch. Straight ahead was water. I hadn\u2019t been to Block Island yet; I\u2019d go two months later for the first time, and then go back two years later to stay and work as a chambermaid. I\u2019d walk in the fog that summer, a big gray block of it that muscled in from the Atlantic one night, obscuring all traces of land and light so thoroughly I thought there\u2019d been a power outage (a rumor that upset some tourists), and as I walked I\u2019d feel like matter suspended in solution, neither liquid nor solid. I\u2019d feel like the fog dissolved my skin and skeleton, and I\u2019d feel like it held time suspended too: not future, not past, not temporal present, either. It was an intuition of the eternal, a moment free from the future\u2019s neediness. And that would remind me of the witch, and I\u2019d shiver in the fog, wondering if I were under her spell. But that hadn\u2019t happened yet. We turned right.<\/p>\n

The witch probably had a name but it didn\u2019t matter then and I\u2019ve forgotten it now. The important things to know are that she was middle aged, a bit heavy, fairer than darker\u2014but maybe that was hair color\u2014she wore glasses, and she was a witch.<\/p>\n

She had a son of about nine, I think\u2014not ten, and that\u2019s important, too. He was just a kid, not a kid on the frontier of ironical, teenage worldliness, but not a little boy either. So nine makes sense. All the lights were bright and the TV was on. One of my few vivid memories of that night: standing in her living room and thinking of Joni Mitchell\u2019s song \u201cThe Last Time I Saw Richard\u201d\u2014\u201cAnd he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on \/ And all the house lights left up bright.\u201d It played in my head all evening. That was the soundtrack; beyond Joni, it was just the two of them, the two of us, electricity, and the sea, heaving in the dark two blocks away.<\/p>\n

We were there to learn about the witch\u2019s life, but thanks to my nineteen-year-old narcissism, I only remember what she said about mine and a little of what she said about Wendy\u2019s. I think she served tea; I know she served port. After a bit of amiable chatting her son took Wendy to see his bedroom, where he told her that demons came out of the mirror and attacked him. To prove it, he showed her something that looked like welts on his forearms.<\/p>\n

After the interview\u2014how she became a witch, what witches do, why they\u2019re misunderstood (she had a chip on her shoulder about that), all the stuff I forget\u2014the witch asked if we\u2019d like her to read our tarot cards. Of course we would. I\u2019d been hoping she\u2019d tell our fortunes one way or another. We quickly sat back down at her dining room table and watched closely as she shuffled the deck.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019ve played this moment back over the years\u2014the moment the witch offered us our futures at her table, served with biscuit crumbs\u2014it\u2019s almost always been accompanied by a memory dissimilar but twinned to it, the way cities are sometimes inexplicably twinned. (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Seattle, Washington? Who\u2019s idea was that?) In the other memory I\u2019m the witch\u2019s son\u2019s age and I\u2019m watching my uncle put a fist-sized rock into the V formed between two shafts of the tree trunk in his front maple. As the years pass one shaft claims the rock and first grows around and then over it while the other arches away. By the time I\u2019m old enough to visit the witch the rock has almost disappeared. I can\u2019t remember the bark-covered rock without a deep, involuntary shudder, as if my uncle had made me privy to a terrible secret, even though to the tree, the rock was no more than a suggestion.<\/p>\n

The witch read Wendy\u2019s cards first. Wendy\u2019s life would go swimmingly; she\u2019d marry happily, live comfortably, have two children, a boy and a girl, and depart this life at age eighty-four. Earthly bliss would be hers.<\/p>\n

This has without exception turned out to be the case, though I can\u2019t comment on her death, as she\u2019s only fifty-two and in strapping health. I don\u2019t know if bliss is exactly hers\u2014anyone balancing two kids, a husband, and her own PR consulting firm doesn\u2019t have time for bliss, which I associate with days spent peeling grapes, sipping champagne, and eating bonbons\u2014but she\u2019s been happy.<\/p>\n

Had I received Wendy\u2019s fortune I suspect the witch would have suggested bliss would be mine, too. It would not have been\u2014most of that wasn\u2019t a good fit for me. I didn\u2019t want children or a husband. But who\u2019s definition of bliss the witch had in mind, Wendy\u2019s or her own (maybe they were similar?), I can\u2019t say. I can offer the observation that in tarot reading, as in everything, interpretation is all.<\/p>\n

Then my turn came. The witch asked me to cut the deck. Or maybe she asked me to cut it several times. I can\u2019t remember. She thought\u2014she must\u2019ve thought, and if she didn\u2019t, she was a fool\u2014\u201cGoddamn Brown kids, in their rag knit sweaters and chinos and Wallaby shoes. Don\u2019t they even know those shoes are sin ugly? Do their parents know they\u2019re in Galilee with a witch\u2014their parents who can open their wallets and pay for a fucking Ivy League education? You want magic? That\u2019s magic. You want the future? Heck, you\u2019ve already got one, ladies. My son \u2026 he\u2019ll probably be a fisherman. That\u2019s what the men do here. Kind of like the men from the other Galilee. And you know what? They die young, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or maybe the witch was happy for the publicity. I don\u2019t know. I might have been bitter.<\/p>\n

I chose my cards, my head swimming a little from the port. The son, unembarrassed by hanging out with his mom and two young women, but bored by now, had left to watch TV. The witch\u2019s interest flickered. She showed me the cards that sealed my fate.<\/p>\n

\u201cHmmm. The cards say that you\u2019re a poet. Interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest is indistinct now, but she went on to say I\u2019d have ups and downs in life. Not too hard a slog\u2014maybe she downplayed it\u2014but difficulties loomed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019ll be okay in the end, right?\u201d I was concerned. No mention had been made of mates or long life.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, sure,\u201d she said, unpersuasively. \u201cBut you\u2019re a poet. I\u2019m seeing that your life won\u2019t be easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went on the defensive. I didn\u2019t want to be a poet. For God\u2019s sake, I was an international relations major.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose I might like to be a journalist\u2026 ,\u201d I mused, wishing to express indignation as politely as possible. After all, I was a guest and she was a witch. I knew what the former entailed, and had some concerns about the latter. The future flashed supportively on a screen in my brain, filing important stories to important newspapers from dangerous but important places like the Middle East.<\/p>\n

The witch smiled and expertly stacked her cards, smacking them against her dining room tabletop with a clack, muffled by the vinyl cloth. After that Wendy and I said our thank yous and drove away, disillusioned. The witch was just a middle-aged lady; her lights were too bright and she left the TV on all the time. Something was either a little\u2014or very\u2014amiss in a house where demons didn\u2019t stay in their mirrors. And she was just plain wrong. Well, I thought so. Wendy was happy with the way things went for her. But I was disgruntled about the poet thing. I disliked poetry. Never read it, never wrote it. Never wanted to. What a faker.<\/p>\n

Pamela Petro\u2019s latest book is<\/em> The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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