Most of us like to look back to our early struggles, to some happy period of marriage, children or business successes, or simply on the strange course that family background, career needs and fortune have taken us on. In my case it’s from a quiet suburban street through the wilder parts of the world to a small flat in Chile, from a fairly solitary childhood to overseeing construction gangs in Iran, to a management role in a multinational company, submissions to learned societies and finally to literary work that is read across the English-speaking work. In itself, the self-indulgence represented by this poem will be of little interest to anyone, I imagine, but in these chapters I have tried to create a poetry of a novel sort out of various phases of life and relate them to astrological features of my natal chart.
Those who can read such things will understand matters at a glance. For those who can’t, or would dismiss the notions outright, it may help to read the quatrains that introduce each section and take them as simply one way of
making sense of our perplexing and often chaotic existences.
.
With Aries as your rising sign you'll take
to arduous journeyings no others make:
alone, intrepid, faring on to where
there will be very few to know or care.
I've lived with millionaires, the starving poor,
discoursed with holy men, and had my thoughts
thrown up on science's hard threshing floor.
I've worked with ministers of various sorts,
in foreign embassies have played some role —
as many have, of course, but may allow
for life seen steadily and seen as whole.
It speaks of common purposes that plough
what else is lonely in the hearts of men
albeit pointlessness of lives condemn
us make the same commuting trip again.
But yet there’s something other, far from them,
which here and unmethodically has come
to this unsettled but not zero sum.
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