Quarter Moon In Sagittarius At The Autumn Equinox

Quarter moon in Sagittarius at the autumn equinox.
The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator
at the equinoctial colure. Sagitta. Arrow in Latin.
Toxos. In classical Greek. Attic dialect. As in
toxin. Or toxologist. Archaic word for archer.
I’m a little teapot short and stout. Here
is my handle. Here is my spout. Tip me over
and pour me out. Zen is the taste of tea.
And maybe those aren’t stars, but flower arrangements
at a Chanoyu ceremony with raku tea bowls,
where even the cracks where the stars leaked out
are cherished like scars on the moon. The porous face
of someone pitted by smallpox. One stone
in a sand garden of stars raked into wavelengths.
If Zen is the taste of tea, then Islam must be
the flavour of coffee. The Christians have
their blood and wine. And the Jews drink deep
of the fountainmouths of their tears by the rivers of Babylon.
Suspiciously symmetrical thought for a heretic like me,
More that of an engineer than a seer watching stars.

A dog barks at sly shadows farms and forms away.
The leaves are brittle and tense. They scratch cold runes
like glacial striations on the wind in passing.
All the waterlilies have candled like parachutes.
The willows are using a lot more hairspray than they used to
and their supple tresses now sway like arthritic rivers
that stiffen up in the damp weather. But soon
you’ll see the stars shining through the veils
of their branches, and the pathos of their ruined beauty
will be renewed by the mystery of a high priestess
that taught Medusa how to dance gracefully
like Algol in the hand of Perseus, in a radiant ballet
of whips and wavelengths. The river seems
more hermetically aloof, withdrawn, removed
from itself as if some deep insight preoccupied it
and even the longing of the nightbird’s lyrics
seem coarsened by hunger in the predatory air.

As for me and my house, I come here alone
where I can turn a hovel of solitude into a palace
of water and wonder and sit until the silence
grows inhuman, and nothing of me remains
but the impersonality of the universe
that’s traded its feathers in for sequins and scales again.
Warm ostrich boas of pampas grass
for sleeker gowns of snakeskin.
Revelation of the burlesque for something
more alluring and dangerous. And the darkness
a northern siren calling me to the rocks like a muse
to the occult grammar of her body language.
I am Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice-Blessed.
I am Thoth who brought the alphabet.
Who only a moment ago as old as the universe
was wholly unmanifest. A fountain asleep in its watershed.
A bird with its head under its wing. Not anything.
Not one. Not two. A wide-eyed, gaping, open-mouthed
zero of an awareness that had burned my identity away
by reaching out to the stars like a thief
torching his fingerprints off like like tiny labyrinths
with search warrants effaced like moths and maple leaves in a candle.

I was out of here like the constellation of the swan
going down over the eyelashes of the western treeline.
After defaulting to the sensuality of the dark all night
who wants to wake up beside the dawn, wincing in the light?
I was out of here like Auriga, the Charioteer.
I always reveled more in the role of guide to the dead
and messenger of the mystery and its eloquence,
master of the occult visionary sciences expressing themselves
as a physics of metaphors, not numbers, the intuitive logic
of synchronized happenings in a charged particle field,
not syntactically linear paradigms that strive fruitlessly
to make things perfectly clear, as if they’d rinsed
all the nectar of life out of them and the light that was left
were the direct result and residue of spiritual erosion.
The sun can boast of the number of sunflowers
it’s got for followers all it wants.
When she appears, a thousand mirrors open
like the third eyes of observatories capstoned
on cold, lonely mountain tops with only one road down or up
and all the reflecting telescopes on clock drives turn their heads her way,
affixed to the mysterious trajectory of a new moon rising in the north
in the thirteenth house of a zodiac that baffles the starmaps
with a darkness that’s brighter than any of their high hopes.