Card for the 23rd: The Queen of Pentacles reversed
Card for the 24th: 5 of cups
Snow fall in western Maryland on this eve of Christmas. I take Losi out first thing in the gray-blue light of late winter dawn and she bounds through the freshly fallen snow. I wonder at her wonder, how most times we come visit Grandma and Pops there’s snow. Is there always snow here, I think she thinks. And why don’t we come play in it more? Why don’t we, I think—we should always come play in snow. The travel day north kept me from writing my last to final Season of Coming and Going with Tarot, so I am combining the 23rd and the 24th days. This works given the story’s movement from abundance to loss.
There is a perfect poem for these two cards, for the story of abundance, loss, and finding some space in between them. It’s John Ciardi’s poem “Abundance.” It’s a poem with a thousand roses and memories of childhood in snow. It’s a poem of weddings and funerals. Abundance in endings. “Penury after flower-strew.” That is the movement from the Queen of Pentacles who is full of plenty, to the 5 of cups showing a figure destitute, trying to pick himself up from the ragged ground.
“To be/perfect, I suppose, we must be brief” the speaker says. The abundance doesn’t last. And it’s not even the words that make it, for they “starve us,” but the “act that feeds.”
The Queen of Cups Reversed told me to recognize when we have the feeling of plenty. And let that be. Then last night I dreamed of a winter field full of the skeletons of grass and the field covered in snow. As I dreamed this, a winter storm blew through and snow fell on hard ground. I felt fully empty as I rested in the image and woke with it in my mind. Its emptiness was complete. And now the 5 of cups presses the story forward, into a fullness like snow, that is, of emptiness, of how snow creates an “angel/on every garbage can, a god/in every tree, that childhood/on every sill.” The speaker in the poem is memory of “the running young wolf of the rare days/when shapes fall from the air/and may be had for the leaping./Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty./And how they are instantly nothing.” He is the memory of action and yet these words are nothing but starvation now.
Following the snow today comes rain. Nothing lasts; we change and are changed. For now, we will go play in it, pretend we are young wolves with hot blood coursing through us.
Ciardi, John. “Abundance.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47014/abundance-56d2272d9d4f5