Maybe back to a suite now.
This is a-- astrological suite.
And I didn't think I placed a great deal of purchase
in astrological suites or in astrology itself.
And I don't suppose, in a way, I still do,
in that day-to-day kind of thing.
My irritation of it really came out in this first book.
I have one little chapter, or one little verse in here
that I'll read before I get to that poem.
"Month of the frozen goat.
La Roberta says cultivate new friends.
Profit will be yours with patience.
Not that stars are crossed, or light to be restored.
We die from want of velocity."
So that sensation of looking up and to see what's
going to happen to you today.
I also think when somebody says you're
going to go on a long, long, long trip, what
somebody in prison thinks of reading that in Rita Del Mar.
Maybe a different kind of trip, or, hopefully,
something for the poor people.
But this is called "The Sign."
There are no magic numbers or magic lives.
He dreams of Sagittarius in a thicket.
Dogs yipe at his hoofs.
The eye of the archer seaward, his
gaze toward impossible things.
Bird to be fish, archer and horse, a whale or dolphin.
Then rears up, canters away from the shore,
across the wide field of fern and honeysuckle brambles,
to a woods where he nibbles at small, fresh leeks coming up
among dead leaves.
Strange creature to be thought of,
welded in the skull as unicorn.
Hoofs, bow, quiver of arrows, and beard.
That girl sitting at cliff edge or beside a brook.
How does he take her?
He lifts her up to kiss her.
And at night, standing by a stream, heavy mist
up to his flanks, mist curling and floating through his legs,
a chill comes over him.
She, in restless sleep in a small stone cottage,
between the scorpion and goat, three signs, winter and Cancer
and this love of snow.
In contempt for all signs, the nine spokes of the sun,
the imagined belt of dark, her girdle in which
night mantles herself.
The stars guide no one, save those
at sea or in the wilderness.
Avoid what stinks or causes pain.
Hate death and cruelty to any living thing.
You do not need the stars for that.
But often, at night, something asks the brain
to ride, run riderless, plumed night swirling, brain riding
itself through blackness, crazed with motion,
footless against the Earth.
Perhaps hooves imagined in lunacy,
through swamps feared even in daytime, at a gallop, crashing
through poplar thickets, tamarack, pools of green slime,
withers splattered with mud, breathing deep
in an open marsh in the center of the great swamp.
Then running again toward an isle of cedar where deer feed.
Pausing, stringing the bull, chasing the deer for miles,
crossing a blacktop road where the hoofs clatter.
On a May night, walking home from a tavern
through a village with only three streetlights,
a slip of moon and still air moist
with the scent of first grass, to look into the blackness
by the roadside in all directions, forest and field
covered with the 18 miles of black to Traverse City,
13 miles of black to Buckley, 19 miles of black to Karlin,
12 miles of black to Walton Junction,
and infinite black above.
Earth herself a heavy, whirly ball of pitch.
If the brain expands to cover these distances,
stumbling to the porch where the cat has
left an injured snake that hisses with the brain,
the brain rearing up to shed the black.
And the snake coiled, bleeding at its center.
Not centaur or archer, but man.
Man standing exhausted at night, beneath the night sky so deep
and measureless.
Head thrown back, he sees his constellation.
His brain fleshes it and draws the lines
which begin to ripple then glimmer, heave and twist,
assume color, rear up, the head high, the chest and torso
gleaming, beard glistening, flanks strapped
with muscle, hooves stomping in place, stomping night's floor.
Rearing again, fading, then regaining terror.
The bow and hand, a strung bow, an arrow fitted, drawn back,
the arrow molten-tipped.
Slay, he only still slays.
And when the arrow reaches earth, I'll die.
But in morning light, already shrill and hot by 10:00,
digging a well pit, the sandy earth
crumbles and traps the legs, binding them to Earth.
Then digging again, driving a shallow well
with a sledge, the well tip shaped as an arrowhead,
sledge hitting steel with metallic ring and scream.
The pump head and arm bound to pipe, sitting in damp sand
with the legs around the pipe, pumping the first water
onto my chest and head.
Head swollen with pain of last night's sign
and leavings of whiskey.
Or on another morning, the frost is
a sheet of white-stubbled silk soon to melt into greenness.
Partridge thumping ground with wings to call her mates,
near a river thick and turbulent and brown.
A great buck deer, startled from a thicket,
a stag of a thousand stories.
How easily his spread antlers trace a back
and bow not unlike your own.
Then the arc of him bounding away into his own green, clear
music.
I don't really know what an astrologer
would think of that, if there are any of you in the audience.