Star Signs in a Parallel Universe

So near and yet so far!

Not talking ’bout the nearest star,

But of the closest parallel universe,

Where things run in reverse.

Astrology there's upside-down:

Your sign's not set at birth

But kicks in when you pop your clogs.

Forlorn,

Like ours, a parallel Jesus died

on April 3rd in AD 33,

An Aries. And in a recent century,

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini

cling together in late April 1945—

They’re both Taurus, Mao’s a Virgo,

And Stalin and Volodya Putin "thrive,"

It's said, in Pisces.

There you go!

Though backwards, perhaps it works:

Your karma’s set from death to being born,

Avoiding much confusing life.

Time there will place the present quirks.

DT was born a Gemini, and a quarter century on,

In Jacaranda City, came his Cancer twin—

Two scheduled presently to relocate to old oblivion.

Not Mars.

But of the topsy-turvy stars'

returns, conversely, don't forget:

A parallel Leo, Elvis fiddles Schubert in the Amadeus String Quartet!

Jacaranda trees in Pretoria, Tshwane, South Africa

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Winter Apocalypse

Winter is icumen in,

Lhude sing Goddamm,

Raineth drop and staineth slop,

And how the wind doth ramm!

Sing: Goddamm.

—Ezra Pound

No hummingbird or flutterby flits through the icy air,

And in the sodden underbrush few questing rodents fare.

Carpenter bees may presently craft burrows in the deck,

Butterflies abound in the abelia,

While squirrels bury acorns, forgetting where.

All that might one day be. Not yet.

Now of the celebrities I’ve met

Most are dead—and, worse, forgotten.

They lacked, it seems, what wiseacres once called “bottom.”*

Oblivious of vainglorious doings in DC,

and humanity going wholesale to the dogs,

with no notion of the apocalypse of the literati,

or the impending doom of poetry,

Autochthons in a comfortable coma

invest humanity's fate in cryptocurrency.

You may not readily deduce from these remarks that I’m a pessimist.

If so, I pray you, sirs and madams, do desist!

*For this usage, see https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2020/11/bottom.html, e.g.: “Although the savages [Amerindians] held out and, as the phrase is, had better bottoms, yet, for a spurt, the Englishmen were more nimble and speedy”—Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature (1774).

January 22, 2025

Rise and Shine

Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus, Allegory of the New World, depicting Vespucci awakening the sleeping America (ca. 1587–89). Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Amerigo Vespucci

Did the hootchy-cootchy—

Being to blame

For the whole late-renaming game!

January 21, 2025