Poetry Horoscopes for Love and Lust in the Year Ahead!

Frances Justine Post

Feb 02, 2012

Sometime after the New Year but before Valentine's Day, I saw an internet meme on Facebook that said:

Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

Ok, I thought. It being a time of new beginnings, as well as the time of upcoming mild embarrassment about being single on Valentine's (the grocery clerk asking if you have big plans when you buy a bottle of wine and bag of chocolate for yourself, and you lie and say "Yes, HUGE." And then you wink.), I was susceptible to this directive. I half believe in horoscopes and astrology. Sometimes I think horoscopes are ridiculous, but other times I scour the internet for anything that will tell me that I have luck or money or love or health coming my way. So, I have decided to become a poetry astrologer for you. Yes, you. It's all random anyway, right? I methodically went through all the poetry books on my shelves and read every page 45, and then I assigned a quote for each astrological sign. I didn't choose the first line necessarily, but the stars did guide me to the perfect lines that will predict your sex life in 2012. I give you the best, most edifying selections here. However, if you share a horoscope with an ex-boyfriend, I am sorry. (If you want to know my horoscope, check out Cancer.) ARIES Kerri Webster, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, from Benediction:

Have you of late touched ice to your lips or The back of your neck, as healing or waking or foreplay?

TAURUS Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, from Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow:

After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering the worth of what was lost, the cost of which was nothing. Between myself and where I stood, there fell a distance only loss could fill, an empty world, a simpleness, its shadows thrown across my window.

GEMINI Ted Hughes, Crow, from Crow's Undersong:

She has come amorous it is all she has come for If there had been no hope she would not have come And there would have been no crying in the city (There would have been no city)

CANCER Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, from Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds:

Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

LEO Tony Tost, Invisible Bride, from 5:

If one evening or street passes by, another shall come. There is always the transformation of environmental events into either eternal or internal regularities, but a wind still comes in the early evening hours and the stars and moons get stacked like the colors of a tin cup.

VIRGO Lucie Brock-Broido, A Hunger, from Elective Mutes:

One day we will burn buildings together. One day we will set fire to great things. It sends shudders down my spine. In the heat of swing park, we will take boys down & mingle with them in the brushes.

LIBRA John Ashbery, Selected Poems, from A Last World:

Everything is being blown away; A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness As we gallop into the flame.

SCORPIO Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love, from If a Wilderness:

I bought a harness, I bought a bridle. I wagered on God in a kind stranger-- kind at first; strange, then less so-- and I was right.

SAGITTARIUS Mark Strand, Selected Poems, from The Dirty Hand:

the clean hand of a man, that you could shake, or kiss, or hold in one of those moments when two people confess without saying a word

CAPRICORN John Berryman, The Dream Songs, from 45:

Their paths crossed and once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed; and over an unsigned letter their eyes met, and in an Asian city directionless & lurchy at two & three, or trembling to a telephone's fresh threat, and when some wired his head to reach a wrong opinion, 'Epileptic'.

AQUARIUS Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea, from Goodnight Lung:

How do we find a thing which isn't concerned enough with us to hide?

PISCES Jean Valentine, Home Deep Blue, from Separation:

Over and over without a smile the little walls break up and bleed pure violence and mend and mend.