Ariana Reines

  • slant January 30, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 30, 2018

    Forsake thy cage, 

                 Thy rope of sands, 

    Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

    Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

              And be thy law, 

    While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

    —George Herbert, “The Collar”

    AT 11:41 AM EST, THE MOON MAKES ITS LAST ASPECT IN CANCER, an opposition to Mercury in Capricorn, to go Void-of-Course over lunchtime 'til she enters Leo at 1:53 PM. 

    This interval is a wonderful opportunity to be silent, or at the very least to slow down your speech (Mercury in Capricorn) and train your inner dialogue on your heart of hearts.

    Mercury will enter

  • slant January 29, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 29, 2018

    fer dans notre coeur (St. John Perse, in a poem I haven’t read in a decade, which I might be misquoting, which I might have invented)

    I'M THINKING ABOUT THE BLUE BLOOD that flows through the heart of the queens and kings of the jungle, the blue interiors of your body, the blue light that spreads behind your eyelids when you’ve seen too much sun. When light is suddenly thrown on you after an accustomed darkness: the blue-white of the shock. The blue haze that hovers around the Alps in real life, making them resemble old photographs of themselves: because that haze is the exact blue hue of decomposing

  • slant January 26, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 26, 2018

    IT SEEMS TO ME THAT MANY, A GREAT MANY SENSED THEIR—BUT I DON’T WANT TO USE THE WORD INCOMPLETENESS. A certain discontinuity in themselves, an opening, a sense that somehow between their skeletons and the flesh there was work to be done, a sense of something insufficiently-come-into-being—not merely the personality, but something else. I think they felt this from the very beginning.

    And I suppose the old sages filled this space with breath, which carried God, I guess, to every cell of the body—commanded God back into the flesh: a kind of mystic remarriage after the necessary divorce

  • slant January 25, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 25, 2018

    SORRY I'M LATE. I'm on a plane. Woke up to coyotes laughing like emphysemic old ladies, rattling their teacups, rattling their big costume jewelry. Orion's Belt was so frank in my dull city eye, like the silver belts studded with fake turquoise they sell at the airport under glass: sometimes it's hard to believe how much you're allowed to have for free you find yourself paying for the knockoff. Being A Parody Of Heaven, a memoir. The virility of “3.” Mercury sextile Jupiter in Scorpio today should have you feeling a little clearer and less freaked out/grossed out by some of the old yous and

  • slant January 24, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 24, 2018

    THE MOON entered Taurus at 8:41 AM EST squaring the Pluto-Mercury conjunction in Capricorn, forming a trine to Saturn in Capricorn, inconjunct Mars toward the end of his run through Scorpio. This is a day for forensics. The Moon attains First Quarter stage at 5:20 PM EST: this represents the first parry, or the first big question put to what you seeded at the New Moon. The seed of the Capricorn New Moon is turning and, to quote Huey Newton, “contradictions are the ruling principle of the universe:” ambition and executive capacity meet an audit both practical and spiritual today.

    1. To find the

  • slant January 23, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 23, 2018

    OBVIOUSLY I KEEP WANTING TO BREAK MY NDA.

    Obviously I have been wanting to do this for years. I have discussed it with editors, with journalists, I have discussed it with myself, I have taken up fiction in the dark, I have “hid my face in a crowd of stars,” I have found so many ways to hide my rage in universal currents and found ways to channel my pedagogy into the stars, about which I have only a beginner’s knowledge, because I want to give, and because I was born to give, and because I have tried to work outside of the ordinary delivery systems of power and knowledge as long as I’ve lived,

  • slant January 22, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 22, 2018

    I WATCHED TWO HAWKS overtake each other in the rising light and ordered another plate of bread and butter. Snow was crisping on the ground, flocked here and there by spikes of blackened grass, like an ancient man’s early beard. I’d promised to research accidents, because a friend of a friend was killed in one last week.

    Uranus was Saturn’s father; Saturn was the father of Jupiter. Uranus was long visible to the naked eye, but was taken for a star, not a planet, until Sir William Herschel announced, in 1781, that he’d been observing what he initially took to be a comet without a tail, but which

  • slant January 19, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 19, 2018

    THE SUN ENTERS AQUARIUS AT 4:24 EST TODAY.

    Aquarius, the water-bearer, rules the ankles and the transmission of information in waves.

    Sound currents; electrical currents; the seeming suddenness with which the spirit of the times commands new social orders.

    Inspiration, and inspiration’s consequences.

    Inspiration, and inspiration’s consequent gossamer and fiber-optic structures.

    The idea of the internet and the internet itself.

    Not so much the waters of Rome, but the imperial aqueducts and plumbing. 

    Less the exploitation of resources than the exploitation of information. The idea of information itself…

  • slant January 18, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 18, 2018

    I’M CURIOUS if you’ve ever found your soul upended by an image. By a single image.

    This is the one that did that to me:

    It was something about the awkwardness and rhythm in exact proportion—something about the Christ, in half-crucifixion position, offering his wound to the probing Jupiter finger of the Apostle Thomas—strange enough to verge on the sexual, awkward enough to wedge itself through the joinery of my skull, crack open my begging bowl, & let the light pour in.

    I’m not Christian at all, but I did watch a lot of Nick at Nite when I was little, and my friends had stuff like this

  • slant January 17, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 17, 2018

    A NEAT GASH OF SUNLIGHT is widening across the sand. We talked late around the fire all night, trading origin stories. An Egyptian god spat into his hand and had congress with himself and made two sons. When things began everything was darkness and goo. A woman took a boat to heaven and got drunk with God and carried all his powers down to Earth. The feminine principle accidentally emanated a son then hid him in clouds; he didn’t know he had parents when he created us; there was much he did not know, in spite of his capacities as a fabricator, hence the world we now know and inhabit. Adam and

  • slant January 16, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 16, 2018

    “analogies are dangerous”

    —Muriel Rukeyser

    I ASKED MY TEACHER how he came to learn astrology. Misery he answered. Misery is a good school I said. The best, he answered. Laughter. 

    I asked him how he’d made my chart eight years ago, whether he worked with an ephemeris in some form. He doesn’t have Internet now and he certainly didn’t have it then. I asked the planets where they were when you were born, he said. I rather believed him, while disbelieving, or I believed him with a sense of humor, the only way one can believe anything, perhaps the only way one should believe anything, including

  • slant January 15, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 15, 2018

    THE NEW MOON occurs tomorrow, January 16, 2018, at 9:17 PM EST, at twenty-six degrees & fifty-five minutes of Capricorn.

    As the Sun’s tenancy in Capricorn nears its end (he enters Aquarius on January 19—preceded by Venus, who moves into Aquarius on January 17, and Mercury sails thataway at the end of the month) this New Moon lovingly invites us, once again, to initiate the structure, discipline, sobriety, & integrity heralded by Saturn’s return home to Capricorn late last year, & by the mystic marriage of masculine and feminine pulsed into us by the Cancer Full Moon on the New Year.

    Mars is hanging

  • slant January 14, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 14, 2018

    The wrong way to take refuge involves seeking shelter—worshipping mountains, sun gods, moon gods, deities of any kind simply because they would seem to be greater than we. This kind of refuge-taking is similar to the response of the little child who says, ‘If you beat me, I’ll tell my mommy,’ thinking that his mother is a great, archetypically powerful person. If he is attacked, his automatic recourse is to his mother, an invincible and all-knowing, all-powerful personality. The child believes his mother can protect him, in fact that she is the only person who can save him. Taking refuge in a

  • slant January 13, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 13, 2018

    Things that are sinuous are the rivers of the land

    Women stalking with the ripple of cats

    Along the leg and movement of the body

    In deep eddies in silk transparencies

    Rivers of the tumbled slopes

    The flatlands to the west

    Tidal-rivers licking and drawing back

    The whole weight of protuberance toward the sea.

    Marking a salt ridge in the bright flush of the flats.

    O sea grasses waving in the high of a quickened

    Sea grass wavering in the high flush of the flats.

    They are women with the bare and subtle feet

    Of brooks or rills of mountain lakes

    Of turbulent cascades of torrential moments

    Of long coil

  • slant January 12, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 12, 2018

    “Poetry’s circulation and its action no longer conjecture a given people but the evolution of the planet Earth.”

    —Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

    SPIRITUALLY, ETHICALLY, ENVIRONMENTALLY, AND ARTISTICALLY, whiteness, or the culture of abstraction, or high capitalism or necrotic rape-based capitalism or whatever you want to call it at this point—is the shithole.

    It’s the eighth anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake.

    There are countless ways one can see the future in Haiti. It has always been ahead of its time. Saint Domingue was, statistically, the most rapacious consumer of African labor

  • slant January 11, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 11, 2018

    MERCURY ENTERED CAPRICORN nine minutes past midnight EST. Goodbye purple prose.

    The Moon is void-of-course in Scorpio from 9:54 AM EST today till she enters Sagittarius 2:05 AM EST tomorrow morning.

    It takes just about twenty-eight days for the Moon to complete her orbit around Earth. She spends about two, two and a half days in each sign of the Zodiac. You know this, but I’ll remind you anyway: She pulls the tides and the water in your body; seeds turn with her, whether in your belly or in the ground. Because she has no light of her own (but rather reflects the Sun’s light) and because she’s just

  • slant January 10, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 10, 2018

    IT OCCURRED TO ME YESTERDAY the cosmos might be too wide for a proper writer’s slender gift: the duty one has to the ever-neglected miniscule majesties and tragedies of Earth stuff. We are supposed to know ourselves. We are supposed to study each other.

    Which is why I had always been reluctant to apply myself as a writer of prose, which I also don’t officially consider myself to be, to matters heavenly. I have adopted this affected tone because it has just now come naturally to me. Writing so well as to write almost purposefully badly.

    Some part of me thinks she can fatten certain wraithlike and