Transits of Uranus
Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2021 5:43 pm
I wrote it in 1986 in another New York at a time I was 'involved' with astrology and the subject of this poem, which is still not finished. https://enneaforum.freeforums.net/threa ... kins-dance He was my mirage. Saturn's rings mark the limits of the known, the orbit of Uranus is eccentric. It rules Aquarius, which he was, is.
Transits of Uranus
for the dutchess
Unreal city, city of dreams
I have waited many moons
for the transits
of Uranus.
I have waited
in the stairwell
for the planets
to align themselves
and sat upon the stoops
of the tenements
to see you.
I have
travelled up the
fire escapes
and stood outside the windows
and pushed aside the clotheslines
to peep into the hidden
inner sanctum of your
soul.
I have roof-topped burnt-out
buildings of the ghetto looking for you.
I have hunted
for your mind
like painted eggs on
Easter Sunday.
It is so brightly colored your mind
like a fine wine
But it is so very difficult to find.
Buried treasure neath the bubbles of the billboard squid of Broadway.
Buried feathers neath the wings of pigeons mating in the park.
Buried measures of the music near the screeching of the subways.
All this and more I have hunted for.
But the goose laid them golden and
they shine like stars
And like ghetto blasters fenders and the headlights of the cars.
And around and around and upside down
I've pursued the music of your mind.
I've perused your convolutions like a Rubrik's cube.
Planetein. To wander.
Your eccentric orbit.
I'll be running after as you ride away.
Uranus. Colliding. Your eccentric orbit.
Dazzling me and dragging me and travelling away.
Your smile
like a supernova
and I can't fight
the eccentricity of your Uranus
but I can't fly
all my life on your rainbows
golden boy
gliding
up and down your colors
like a sliding pond
and you're the pot of god
at the end
only you're
not waiting
to catch me
but you shimmer
shimmer
so brightly
in the night
like quicksilver
slipping
through the fervor
of my fingers.
I'm waiting for a sunshower.
You bring
Uranus
and it's light and it's bright but I can't hold it.
I've told it to you
and thousand and one times.
You're eccentric
And what I cannot hold
for a fraction of a moment
I will remember dutchess
all of my life.
Your eccentric orbit, dutchess, pathways to glory.
And your dragons and your turrets I
am chasing you
past fire escapes and garbage heaps
and shooting galleries
around grafittied walls
and barricades and
ghetto blasters
dutchess I
am
chasing
your orbit
cascading
your city
that you plow through like a speedboat run amok in a dream.
And the cotton candy froth that is your mind
your circus baby chasing you
through the byzantine spirograph swirls of your mind
your orbit baby
chasing you
down through time
like a cop on patrol down the lower east side
your castle
your turrets
fire escapes
barricades
your moat
your chimney
your dungeon
your alleyways
your rats
your crocodiles
catapults
dutchess
your armour
your towers
your junkies
your shooting
your art galleries
your playgrounds
your housing projects
buttresses
palisades
your drawbridges
buildings
your gutters
your grime
your east village
baby
down through slime
your eccentric orbit
through a candy land where cocks dance like lollipops
your fairy tale
your filth
your grit
your decay
your east village baby
down through time
your pathways dutchess. I follow.
I followed.
Your sliding pond. Your wings. Your pigeon shit
until
I am tired, dutchess, tired.
Unreal city.
dull gray sprawling concrete barrage of horrors and of wonders
filth excrement and newsprint like wonders
bridges irons and beams to nothingness
gigantic sewage pit oil slick of smoke rays coming
from smokestacks spewing
from freight trains running
running running and coming
barges sailing under the bridges
honking tooting screeching and calling
walls fading dirty billboards scrawling
filth grafitti sweet meat summer heat
and kids playing
in fire hydrants
sirens bleating
mothers screaming
soot clouds watching
and fallout
and fallout
of industry.
Water pouring out
of hydrants.
Soot spewing out
of chimneys.
Crimes oozing out
of people.
Pigeons cooing out
of cooped-up places.
squirrels live in lampposts
people live in subways
rats live in crowded sewers
congestion
repulsion
repression
Buildings towers windows
racket
clanging
banging
hammering of souls
again and again
making racks
making gray
making bridges
making cities
again and again.
Pulleys
extensions
labyrinths
and truth
hammering of truths
in the frenzy
of the city.
What I would do if I could touch you.
Planetein. Penance. Disparate, desparate penance.
It's
jagged
cracked
smoked stack city
cacophony of light
cracked life
cacaphony of life
fragmented
ruptured broken
haphazard
random
asymmetrical
jagged
cracked
makeshift
involuntary
fractured
unplanned
orgiastic
sprawling
diffuse
dissipated
ugly lovely
city
peripheric
peripatetic
very pathetic
city
What I would do if I could touch you.
Planetein. To wander. Endless, relentless penance.
Your eccentric orbit
veers past everything.
Your eccentric orbit
way past Saturn's rings.
I would
do anything
for your eccentric orbit.
I would chase you down the tunnels
and the trapdoors
of your mind
through the alleyways the detours and the dead ends
or your orbit
up the fire escapes the wires and the
tightropes of your orbit
All
this and more I would gladly risk
for the privilege and the bliss
of walking with you through time
in the sanctum of your mind
whose walled in cities
hold the divine simplicity
of your eccentricity.
Your eccentric orbit cutchess pathways to glory.
Come he said I'll show you
the merry-go-round.
Candyland, candyland has come to town.
And the gypsies with their tents
and the skeetball players.
And the horses up and down
on the merry-go-round.
Up and down up and down.
Dazzling mottled colored
Flecks of rainbowed wood
charging ever endlessly
above beyond around.
And the barker and the hawker
and the wheel goes round and round.
I'll show you he said gumballs
rainbows
and the grand return to the sliding ponds of yesterday.
Fairyland
redemption
come he said and I came
to the fairground
came
to the music
and my childhood sang in me again like freedom.
Swings parks endless sliding ponds of memory and I am going down
down
down
to
your eccentric orbit dutchess twirling me around
and around and around
and upside down
But
that night I took you beyond the circle didn't I?
Just when you were least expecting it weren't you
Ouranos I twirled and completed the circle
around and around and around
that night
I took you where you knew you were going didn't I
you with your painted ponies and barker's cry
I pulled you in my steadfast orbit sunlike around galaxies
to the place where the race begins and ends
perfectly smooth like a pebble on the beach
and it was soundless as the sea
wasn't it
and steadfast as the sun
and wistful as the tide
being pulled by the moon
inside outside
again and again
and it stopped
didn't it
at the place beyond childhood beyond movement beyond memory
where the convulsing colliding colors stop
and become nothingness
all the ponies stopped the barker stopped the music stopped
didn't they
everything stopped
but you and me
we didn't stop
we were dead weren't we
and could not stop
being dead endlessly
and would not stop
being dead
endlessly
and then I heard the traffic
and I let you twirl me once again around and around.
Transits of Uranus
for the dutchess
Unreal city, city of dreams
I have waited many moons
for the transits
of Uranus.
I have waited
in the stairwell
for the planets
to align themselves
and sat upon the stoops
of the tenements
to see you.
I have
travelled up the
fire escapes
and stood outside the windows
and pushed aside the clotheslines
to peep into the hidden
inner sanctum of your
soul.
I have roof-topped burnt-out
buildings of the ghetto looking for you.
I have hunted
for your mind
like painted eggs on
Easter Sunday.
It is so brightly colored your mind
like a fine wine
But it is so very difficult to find.
Buried treasure neath the bubbles of the billboard squid of Broadway.
Buried feathers neath the wings of pigeons mating in the park.
Buried measures of the music near the screeching of the subways.
All this and more I have hunted for.
But the goose laid them golden and
they shine like stars
And like ghetto blasters fenders and the headlights of the cars.
And around and around and upside down
I've pursued the music of your mind.
I've perused your convolutions like a Rubrik's cube.
Planetein. To wander.
Your eccentric orbit.
I'll be running after as you ride away.
Uranus. Colliding. Your eccentric orbit.
Dazzling me and dragging me and travelling away.
Your smile
like a supernova
and I can't fight
the eccentricity of your Uranus
but I can't fly
all my life on your rainbows
golden boy
gliding
up and down your colors
like a sliding pond
and you're the pot of god
at the end
only you're
not waiting
to catch me
but you shimmer
shimmer
so brightly
in the night
like quicksilver
slipping
through the fervor
of my fingers.
I'm waiting for a sunshower.
You bring
Uranus
and it's light and it's bright but I can't hold it.
I've told it to you
and thousand and one times.
You're eccentric
And what I cannot hold
for a fraction of a moment
I will remember dutchess
all of my life.
Your eccentric orbit, dutchess, pathways to glory.
And your dragons and your turrets I
am chasing you
past fire escapes and garbage heaps
and shooting galleries
around grafittied walls
and barricades and
ghetto blasters
dutchess I
am
chasing
your orbit
cascading
your city
that you plow through like a speedboat run amok in a dream.
And the cotton candy froth that is your mind
your circus baby chasing you
through the byzantine spirograph swirls of your mind
your orbit baby
chasing you
down through time
like a cop on patrol down the lower east side
your castle
your turrets
fire escapes
barricades
your moat
your chimney
your dungeon
your alleyways
your rats
your crocodiles
catapults
dutchess
your armour
your towers
your junkies
your shooting
your art galleries
your playgrounds
your housing projects
buttresses
palisades
your drawbridges
buildings
your gutters
your grime
your east village
baby
down through slime
your eccentric orbit
through a candy land where cocks dance like lollipops
your fairy tale
your filth
your grit
your decay
your east village baby
down through time
your pathways dutchess. I follow.
I followed.
Your sliding pond. Your wings. Your pigeon shit
until
I am tired, dutchess, tired.
Unreal city.
dull gray sprawling concrete barrage of horrors and of wonders
filth excrement and newsprint like wonders
bridges irons and beams to nothingness
gigantic sewage pit oil slick of smoke rays coming
from smokestacks spewing
from freight trains running
running running and coming
barges sailing under the bridges
honking tooting screeching and calling
walls fading dirty billboards scrawling
filth grafitti sweet meat summer heat
and kids playing
in fire hydrants
sirens bleating
mothers screaming
soot clouds watching
and fallout
and fallout
of industry.
Water pouring out
of hydrants.
Soot spewing out
of chimneys.
Crimes oozing out
of people.
Pigeons cooing out
of cooped-up places.
squirrels live in lampposts
people live in subways
rats live in crowded sewers
congestion
repulsion
repression
Buildings towers windows
racket
clanging
banging
hammering of souls
again and again
making racks
making gray
making bridges
making cities
again and again.
Pulleys
extensions
labyrinths
and truth
hammering of truths
in the frenzy
of the city.
What I would do if I could touch you.
Planetein. Penance. Disparate, desparate penance.
It's
jagged
cracked
smoked stack city
cacophony of light
cracked life
cacaphony of life
fragmented
ruptured broken
haphazard
random
asymmetrical
jagged
cracked
makeshift
involuntary
fractured
unplanned
orgiastic
sprawling
diffuse
dissipated
ugly lovely
city
peripheric
peripatetic
very pathetic
city
What I would do if I could touch you.
Planetein. To wander. Endless, relentless penance.
Your eccentric orbit
veers past everything.
Your eccentric orbit
way past Saturn's rings.
I would
do anything
for your eccentric orbit.
I would chase you down the tunnels
and the trapdoors
of your mind
through the alleyways the detours and the dead ends
or your orbit
up the fire escapes the wires and the
tightropes of your orbit
All
this and more I would gladly risk
for the privilege and the bliss
of walking with you through time
in the sanctum of your mind
whose walled in cities
hold the divine simplicity
of your eccentricity.
Your eccentric orbit cutchess pathways to glory.
Come he said I'll show you
the merry-go-round.
Candyland, candyland has come to town.
And the gypsies with their tents
and the skeetball players.
And the horses up and down
on the merry-go-round.
Up and down up and down.
Dazzling mottled colored
Flecks of rainbowed wood
charging ever endlessly
above beyond around.
And the barker and the hawker
and the wheel goes round and round.
I'll show you he said gumballs
rainbows
and the grand return to the sliding ponds of yesterday.
Fairyland
redemption
come he said and I came
to the fairground
came
to the music
and my childhood sang in me again like freedom.
Swings parks endless sliding ponds of memory and I am going down
down
down
to
your eccentric orbit dutchess twirling me around
and around and around
and upside down
But
that night I took you beyond the circle didn't I?
Just when you were least expecting it weren't you
Ouranos I twirled and completed the circle
around and around and around
that night
I took you where you knew you were going didn't I
you with your painted ponies and barker's cry
I pulled you in my steadfast orbit sunlike around galaxies
to the place where the race begins and ends
perfectly smooth like a pebble on the beach
and it was soundless as the sea
wasn't it
and steadfast as the sun
and wistful as the tide
being pulled by the moon
inside outside
again and again
and it stopped
didn't it
at the place beyond childhood beyond movement beyond memory
where the convulsing colliding colors stop
and become nothingness
all the ponies stopped the barker stopped the music stopped
didn't they
everything stopped
but you and me
we didn't stop
we were dead weren't we
and could not stop
being dead endlessly
and would not stop
being dead
endlessly
and then I heard the traffic
and I let you twirl me once again around and around.