kairos
love keys your braincar
dipping in to Zane B Stein’s forgotten book on Chiron1 (who is kissing Venus our current bound ruler of the Sun now), i read that Chiron rules kairos time and REM sleep (among other things)
the next few days can be that sort of immediate, timelessness of this abyss, sort of spell that comes over you when love strikes. especially unrequited love.
kairos time
reminds me also of a work of criticism, The Sense of an Ending, by Frank Kermode, whose title has been eclipsed by a more recent novel of the same name (sting!). If i were your professor, this book would be your assigned reading for the week.
Since i’m not, I’ll share a poem that i wrote to a then-young man born on my Venus/IC line, an ocean and a language away, while i was madly in love with him and realizing that the flash of a future i imagined for us would only be real in story.2
To amplify the theme of rejection, I offered this poem to my boss, who ran a literary magazine, and she told me she wouldn’t publish it because it was too sentimental. She’s right, but at least she had the guts to reject me to my face, which satisfied the itch his abandonment couldn’t scratch. It’s not eclipse season, but the poem references kairos time, so here we go:
IN THE TIMELESSNESS OF THIS ECLIPSE
A ceaseless hiss, a fizz,
a din of shhh lanced with a “Now!”
You burst through my acoustic shield,
melt my resistance into thick drops
that slip into your gentle sonic envelope
that consumes me until I glisten,
unarmed, distilled to naked ore.
But with the fuel spent, you can no more.
The silence you’ve left is glacial.
Parched, I pull your language over my tongue,
into my throat, across impossible futures.
A shrill barb in your absence: “não”
ricochets off the fresh canyons in me, resounding
intensity; the “Šão” pierces at each contact.
Alone now, I face myself, with this absent score
burnishing
a sharp echo of the thick hiss I long for.It may well be a time for longing, for immediacy, for bad poetry, and to dwell in the presence of absence.
~
As of this writing, 69 of my goal of 555 people have shown their support for CAELi on Patreon. Will you be my quintile (72) or tredecile (108) supporter?
~
See you again on the day of April’s fool, where trickster Mercury takes over in a big way.
-jenn
Cover photo by Anthony Lopez on Unsplash.
I actually ended up learning Portuguese to dispel my love/infatuation, so that i’d realize he’d be talking about buying lettuce at the supermarket, or something equally mundane, instead of saying some amazing-sounding thing that would get me all excited. Over a decade later, this learn-Portuguese-to-heal-your-heart ended up in me understanding a lot of what happened around me when I went to Brazil last October. So I found myself thankful for this unrequited love and how I chose to heal from it. And… This is why you should always read footnotes. And sign up for CAELi’s Patreon, so you can put fab footnotes in your own astro-writings and make your editors happy and get them to publish you. Or be like Azur and keep the footnotes in yr amazing substack, but you still cite your sources, which you can get at CAELi. Yep.
Yes professor I will be the student and read the assigned book. And a few days late but I was busy with the Chiron return. Maybe just maybe right on time. Thank you!
I love footnotes, especially in children’s books. And my kids know I often set the thermostat to 69 because it’s hilarious. Also, I wrote a poem earlier today at the request of a Pisces friend, longing for the back n forth we’d do that petered out last fall. Anyway, I thought about titling the poem “juvenile” because it was like the air itself (all Saturn Neptune haze and I literally can’t comprehend how it’s Thursday already) simultaneously called forth boring tropes and then pointed out how boring and tropey every line was. Your writing, however, is brilliant and on point as always! Thank you!