Palm Reading (Poem)

Palm Reading
    for Michelle Rummel

She counts her blessings
      within the lines of her palm.

Length, she'd heard once, has
      nothing to do with living close

to the edge. Her heart's line
      ends in a thick knot of branches,

and her head line, extending far
      beyond the middle of her painter's

palm, pays a ransom to ambition.
      She quarrels with all the tiny nicks

the reader finds, some indivisible
      number she discovered could be

used to retrace the ground already
      covered in that wide smooth stretch

between thumb and index finger.
      Her life line starts high enough

but just before the gentle curve
      above the wrist she spies the chains

invisible to others whose own
      break at the forks on their hands

or double up like devoted soul
      mates. Deep in the center of her

self unseen lies fate's sinuous slant,
      and there, on the side underneath

the pinky, two long love marks.
      Intuition's prominence tells her

nothing more about the three
      bracelets her reader sees, or

the many places she'll travel,
      where a crescent moon lingers —

her lover's shield, her Girdle of Venus.

© 2012 Maureen E. Doallas
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This poem varies somewhat from a draft I left in the comments section of a recent post at TweetSpeakPoetry. I used as my prompt the phrase "within the lines of her", part of the poem that accompanied the lovely watercolor She Breathes Cerulean by Michelle ("Shell") Rummel of Shell Artistree.