Gemini
To belay a path upward,
I string a bow of newfound gut
and aim
towards an aperture of logic in the sky.
Horoscopes indicate:
chin up. You should go out tonight.
Summer’s daisy eyes stare at Dawn,
its clarity of cosmic red.
I’m awash in the season.
The people who act on love
in a mute tangle of ligaments,
and those who keep their own bread
and salt
speak elusive truth: there is nothing I have
that would make you love me:
no leverage, no pride at recognition, no dog.
I idle in torrents of reason,
wild-running streams
where iridescent fish cast straight lines
to the re-emerging sun.
Invisible mouths breath on my body
I’m searching for you, twin.
| Mary Catherine Kinniburgh |
|
levelheaded: Gemini
This poem begins with the assumption, likely tongue-in-cheek, that astrology can be “an aperture of logic in the sky.” Maybe it’s the word “logic” that casts doubt on the speaker’s reliability. There isn’t an easily discernible “logic” to horoscopes. To be fair, the speaker keeps a layer – an “aperture” – between herself and the concept of “logic,” and the she never explicitly says her “path upward” is through astrology. But the constellations are “up,” and the presence of a bow and arrow (along with the title, of course) point to the Zodiac. Is it possible the speaker’s a Sagittarius?
No matter the speaker’s sign (or her faith in horoscopes), her confidence – emphasized by the poem’s purposefully overwrought language – tells us a lot about her optimism. Yes, she seems miserable in the lines “there is nothing I have / that would make you love me,” but this is an abstract misery. She may mean this sentence to apply to her own situation, but she is interpreting the “elusive truth” of others’ experiences in love. The speaker looks outside of herself for guidance – not just to horoscopes, but also to real world examples like “people who act on love / in a mute tangle of ligaments” or those who mysteriously “keep their own bread / and salt.”
How do we know the speaker is conscious of her intensely poetic language? What keeps painterly language like “clarity of cosmic red,” “mute tangle of ligaments,” or “idle in torrents of reason” from being over-the-top? All this is kept in check when the speaker modulates her voice in an early moment of advice in the second stanza. Here the language is perfectly clear: “[C]hin up. You should go out tonight.” Okay, message received. This advice lets us know, even if the horoscope’s message gets muddled as it is processed by the speaker’s memory, a clear recommendation gets through. And the moment characterizes the speaker. As much as she is willing to “belay a path upward,” she also hesitant to take the advice she gets. Ultimately, the poem is less about the speaker’s compatibility with her invisible “twin” and more about her struggle to stop idling, to act, to do something other than read her horoscope.
-The Editors
