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

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

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

“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

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

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

JANUARY

            January long light

            Janus     I see you

            God of locks and doorways

 

            two-faced looking in Capricorn

            Capricorn like the snowy owl

                        irruption

 

            We fear heavy body collisions

            January     time of doors

            time looking back on itself

                        God of gates

                        spelt and salt

            They say when you

            walk through a door

            you can forget what

                        you came for

–Hoa Nguyen, VIOLET ENERGY INGOTS  (Wave Books,

ON FRIDAY IT HAPPENED that a few of my natal chart clients were in Dublin, & just as I was finishing a Skype with the last one, an Irish director walked in off the plane & into the house where I work. He took a nap in an efficiency apartment adjacent to my workroom, then commenced rehearsing a Yeats play with a troupe of actors in the salon upstairs. I had no idea this would be happening. That’s the kind of house this is. It might be one of the last genuinely “bohemian” households in Manhattan. Thespians and poets are always climbing up and down the stairs, nurturing and collaborating on difficult

Democracy isn’t efficient, and the only politics I recognize lies

between us, undefined, requiring no casting of votes. It asks that we

admit we’re both present, all present, in the same multiform space—

within me or you. I would never ask you to follow me; I will never

acknowledge a leader. I am my president. But also, I am

everyone, trying to be with you, because I exist, and always have.

—Alice Notley, “Two of Swords,” p6. Certain Magical Acts. Penguin, New York: 2016.

VERY STABLE GENIUS: It’s kind of beautiful. I mean, the mental health industry is pretty insane too. This is shadow

A MEATHEAD CARTEL LORD walks into an S&M brothel with a genial jetsetting billionaire. The brothel is “over the border” in some more lawless territory and it has a hardcore; excellent reputation. The meathead is well-known there, they treat him like royalty, call him by pet names, mix his favorite cocktails; the billionaire might have been there once or twice, but he travels so much he can’t say exactly when. The Brothel’s Yelp reviews are all like “Holy fuck” and “I’ll never be the same again.” This is a fairly new bromance, but thoroughly in the old odd couple buddy flick tradition. The

I’VE LISTENED TO THIS POEM a couple hundred times. And read it over & over too. I never get used to it.

It induces a kind of hypnosis; a lucidity on the edge of total oblivion. It’s not an easy effect to describe; I think it has to do with magic; I think it casts and means to cast a spell. And yet it is descriptive, direct, etched, and bright, like the plain narration of a thousand-year hallucination, like the Wikipedia entry for a dream.

Peacocks started showing up in my life in the summer of 2013. How do I explain “showing up”? All of a sudden I was seeing them, like they were everywhere in

Behold!

Whose multitudes are these?

The children of whose turbaned seas,

Or what Circassian land?

—Emily Dickinson

EMILY’S “TURBANED SEAS” have been roaring through me lately. I think because the thought of binding up the ocean is the kind of coil of imagination that seldom happens outside childhood and picture books—and so it calls to me, but also because it has been so cold in New York that when I close my eyes I see oceans roped in white ice, turbaned, as it were, bound up in some mystic freeze.

But it’s also, and possibly mainly, because just after the solstice I started doing