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A
True Astrology Love Story
My
wife and I live near Santa Barbara, California.
We like taking walks on the beach. My wife is
a Pisces and especially enjoys anything having
to do with water. Our backyard has fountains and
my wife will sometimes ask me to turn on the lawn
sprinklers on a hot, summer evening
just so she can hear the sound of water.
We
were walking on the beach one day and it was so
beautiful that I went home and wrote a poem. I
did not tell my wife about the poem. Instead,
I sent it into The Mountain Astrologer.
They ended up publishing it in the Feb./Mar. 2003
issue. The poem is titled, “Pisces: A Love
Poem.” I asked The Mountain Astrologer
to include the following:
Philip
Brown is married and has a lively teenage daughter.
He wrote this poem as a surprise for his wife,
who will be reading it here for the
first time.
When
my copy of the magazine arrived, I left it on
the kitchen counter for my wife. I attached a
note to the front cover: “Open this to p.
97. Look for something with a title you might
want to read. Then read it. Love, Phil.”
She opened the magazine to p. 97 and then began
to cry.
Here’s
the poem.
Pisces:
A Love Poem
Beside
the ocean,
I
always let you walk
nearest
the tide:
I
like to listen through your
golden
sunlight mists
to
the sounds of the waves
dragging
a million pebbles back
from
the shore and out to sea
with
a sound like seeds
in
an African rain stick
turned
upside down.
You
are like a shell—
iridescent
pink coral,
fluted
and delicate—
I
once found on the beach:
I
held it to my ear and heard
what
it must have sounded like
when
Spirit first moved
over
the liquid surface of the earth.
_____________________________________________________________
March
30, 2007
Leo:
Second Saturn Return (Taurus Rising)
Here are some of my leaves:
eating fruit silently from a white
bowl
while the Pacific sun sets;
riding in the back of a red truck
after picking broccoli near the ocean;
driving a taxicab
on the streets of
Hollywood
after midnight in December
when golden-green tinsel was draped
between streetlights
and grinding garbage trucks
swallowed shivery dumpsters;
sitting on the floor while leaning
against the wall of a room,
wearing a black vest with white polka
dots
and jeans with a yellow patch in the
shape
of a star on one knee,
listening to the Incredible String
Band
and eating homemade chapattis;
watching a girl’s reflection
in the darkened window
of the London
tube while listening
to two men talk loudly about musical
vibrato,
and still tasting of Cadbury’s;
sleeping on the sidewalk
outside the Gare du Nord…
These have all dropped away,
leaves plucked gently
by time and the air and released
silently,
leaving only bare branches, twigs,
and roots which stretch
deep into the earth,
searching for moisture.
________________________________________________________________________
August 1, 2007
Nicked by Neptune
Breathe
in,
deeply…
Mumtaz
incense,
soft
harmonium,
here…
here was
the
white
fig tree
blossom
I
brought
to lay
on a
blue
altar
carpet.
nicked
by
Neptune…
21…right
there…I
spun,
saw
lights,
entered
gold,
didn’t
move
but sat
straight
in a
soft
yellow
chair
my heart
soared
exhale
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
May
17, 2006--Life can sometimes be
challenging and difficult. I wrote the following poem
about the difficulty of walking through fear and
the need to accept change, especially as we grow
older and it becomes harder to step into
an unknown future. The past can seem comforting,
but it can also inhibit and suffocate. When I
lived in London (see my bio.),
I wore a blue cape. That's not as strange as it
sounds. The Beatles, on the
cover of their Help! album,
wore coat-capes, and capes for guys were
a fashion in London in the mid-1960's. I also
had long hair which I fastened into a pony
tail with orange yarn. In this poem, I tried to
use the imagery of Neptune and Pluto to communicate
my own difficulty in freeing myself from the outworn
fears of youth to emerge into a richer and better
future, to cross the threshold between two worlds,
to become unstuck.
Neptune, Pluto, Between Two Worlds
I
was 17, in London, and
I was cold.
I
got a blue cape and orange yarn and made myself
a
gift, I thought, of myself
to
myself, and as though I was a winter Maypole
I
turned and turned until I was wrapped,
a
bat knit up in the fog,
awaiting
tomorrow.
To
be unwrapped is a fear, is an intoxication,
is
a naked inhalation.
I
don't emerge chrysalis-like
nor
do I step through the difference
between
here and there.
I
don't do anything at all really
but
fear an idea which glows in a smoky room
and
burns my lungs
the
closer I approach,
my
cape now in shreds,
loose
yarn blown and dangling
like
sad slit whispers, soft tendrils
that
I drag through the dark air.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Here
are two more poems I have had published.
First
Saturn Return
by
Philip Brown
(originally
published in Transfer
magazine)
Father,
your voice escapes
inside
me many times.
There
are portions which divide like echoes,
these
are my thoughts—
something
to the way your eyes
recede
always from me, that you know where I end;
deep
within you, the inception
of
my worth and moment waits
behind
all the doors I might have
closed
on you.
Moon
Square Uranus
by
Philip Brown
(originally
published as “At The Glo Worm”)
Laughing
yet not quite bold
I
am smug in your bourbon-drinking scene.
I
hang my arm casual, limply
over
the arm of the chair.
I
sip, not knowing the stories
you
laugh at me are only the ends
of
sentences rising like stones
in
the sandy eyesight of a jukebox;
my
eyes lean down to those rhythms,
you
smile your gambling way,
rolling
the dice and talking.
I
do not move, as you wait
for
me to begin;
that
is how we stay,
your
laugh approaching me,
I bending in my icy glass.
T
his
poem won a California state poetry award:
Full
Moon: Aviary at Night
I
enter the aviary at night.
The
air is slatted starry:
a
branch stirs,
flickers
in
the yellow zebra moon
like
a match struck from
silence:
the
sound of leaves
quivering,
a feather
molting,
delicate, glancing
off
a darkened stone.
A
tumbling of wings:
a
bird
swoops
starward,
his
flight arced,
tracing
the upward
circumference
of the air,
he
pitches himself suddenly
against
the wooden slats
of
the aviary
with
a soft sound
like
a footstep in the dust--
blinded,
he is
stunned
and falling
through
the dark and yellow
ribbons
of the air;
startled,
his wings open,
shake
loose his plummet,
banking
upward as the night
becomes
round again,
and
I touch quietly the limits
in
the thought of you.
