Marc Alan Di Martino

The Trouble with Star Signs
 
She quoted the New York Times astrologer:
“Virgo and Aries, a match lit in hell.”
“Astrology is bunk,” I thought (and said),
“a virus of the mind.” “Typical Virgo,”
her retort. Beer ferried us through years
fuelled by an esoteric cat’s cradle
of beliefs. It was, of course, all magical
thinking, but we cosplayed it anyway —
her witch’s hat, my wizard’s robe, the dog
with its electrocuted fur. I learned
of star signs, houses, distant looming worlds
ascending over us: earth, water, air
and fire. Fixed, cardinal and mutable.
(A deck of tarot cards lay on the table.)
But how was all of this supposed to work
I wondered, making a case for hard science
of which I knew too little, though enough
to know the enterprise was jerry-rigged.
How can smart people let themselves be duped
when all our knowledge screams it isn’t so?
It doesn’t square with physics, chemistry,
biology. She trotted out her evidence:
Aries’ fierce eyebrows jut out like rams’ horns.
Leos have feline eyes and lions’ manes.
And Virgo? Virgo’s pure pain in the ass!
(She had me on that last point.) Capricorn
is stubborn as the Latin ruminant
it’s named for. As for Sagittarius,
impish jester, she’s unpredictable.
Gemini, the Janus-faced. And on and on,
a litany of tropes picked up from pop
astrologers, newspaper horoscopes.

The problem is you begin to see things
after a while. Faint contours emerge
from abstract contrails: clouds morph into whales,
friends and family to fish, scorpions,
bulls. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Life becomes parody, a corny line
from a movie: Hey, baby, what’s your sign?

Virgo and Aries never made it, alas.
Venus transited. Decades have passed
and now I’m overrun by chimeras —
mermaids, centaurs, hobgoblins. Too late
now, to shake them, blow them off like dust
from an old lamp. They stubbornly refuse
to be ushered into the sunlight, take
their medication, be reasoned with,
this motley company of bogeymen
with their astrolabes and alchemist’s beards
inhabiting the cobwebbed underside
of my brain. They lurk unwanted — a pain,
though slight — undetectable as legerdemain.

Marc Alan Di Martino’s books include Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco (World Poetry, 2024—longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Rattle, iamb, Palette Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.