Eugene Walter used to ask every new acquaintance: "What sign are you?" I am reading Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala. I know, I know; it's a memoir/ travelogue -- but so is poetry. It's just a shift in form.
Grandmother told me it had been written in my sister Chi's fortune penned by a Vietnamese Buddist monk on the day of her birth, in the year of the Tiger: suicide at thirty-two. We were sitting on Grandmother's bed in the very room where Chi had hung herself. The rope was gone, but there was incense ash in the carpet, its fragrant prayers locked in. Grandmother closed her hands over mine and and asked me quietly if I wanted to read my birth fortune. It was from the hand of the same monk, written twenty-seven years earlier. She pressed into my chest a yellowed fortune-scroll crushed and tattered, its secret bound by an umbilical cord of red twine. I looked at this relic from a distant world, dreading its power. I said no, quit my job, and bicycled into the Mexican desert.
What sign were you born under? Looking at the specifications related to your sign, where does this lead you?
Posted by SBW on June 13, 2008
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