Mercury in Pisces: The Mind of the Poet
I woke up the morning Mercury went into Pisces thinking of the poet Nazim Hikmet.
I read his poems in graduate school, and I remembered him as the poet who was so threatening to the Turkish state they threw him in prison. I read the poems that got him locked up, and I understood why the people in power felt threatened. The poems were technically proficient and effective—clever, incisive, a little bitter. They stirred the blood. Most importantly—or most threateningly to the state—the political poems were failures as poems. They were words in the shape of poems trying to accomplish something. They were preachy. People subjected to preachy poets for too long get desperate. They will do anything to get the poet to shut up, even if it means overthrowing the state.
The poems he wrote in prison were a different story. They were the poems of a man who had every reason to give up on life but kept himself alive by constantly escaping in his mind, thinking of the simple pleasures awaiting him outside. They were the poems of a man staring at a concrete wall, dreaming of the sky.
In my heart, I am a poet. I was a poet before I was a fiction writer, before I wrote about astrology. The first thing I ever wrote for myself—not for school—was a poem about a chickadee. It was a ridiculous poem. In my poem, the chickadee was a world traveler, journeying over the land and sea and rivers. No chickadee is ever going to fly across an ocean. It isn’t a streamlined long-distance traveler like an albatross. It is a flappy garden bird. But a poet is never talking about themselves more literally than when they are telling lies and claiming to be writing about something else. I wrote that poem from my bed at 9 years-old, staring out the window dreaming of going outside on a day when I was—once again—unable to walk. I was a child staring at a bird feeder, dreaming of freedom.
Did you hear it? My voice broke on the word “freedom.”
All poetry is the language of imprisonment and exile dreaming of existence without boundaries.
It was in poetry that I found my voice. When my mind was still malleable, I took on the mind of a poet. Poets create poems in the mind the way a fisherman knits a net, carefully creating gaps big enough to let the tiny fish slip through without injury, small enough to capture the big fish alive. A poet understands that it is impossible to dissect a frog without killing it, and yet, without dissection, there is only so much you can know about the circulatory system. It is a common assumption that poets don’t care about the circulatory system. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing we want to know more than the hidden transit system of the heart. We know that the heart is a city we will never visit except through pictures. You can’t touch a city in a picture. You can only live in it in your mind. The longing to inhabit that city drives us. How could we not want to know everything about the city of the heart in the few short years before it falls into ruins?
The morning Mercury went into Pisces, I was thinking like a poet.
My mind was full of ideas. I covered the kitchen table with sticky notes like Indra’s net, metaphors precious enough to crystalize in ink, held together by tenuous associations and the thinnest threads of logic.
Indra is a Hindu god. When he throws lightning, he is the stormy sky. He rides rain clouds the way a child poet rides a chickadee in the garden. He channels storms the way a medium channels the dead. A poet is a channel of impossible things. We have no idea what we are channeling. We only know urgency, the unshakable knowing that if we don’t run for a pen to capture our thoughts about trains, something unspeakably precious will slip away and be lost to us forever. It is never actually about the train, though the poet believes that it is. Ignorance is an important safety feature for poets. We are not Indra. The only way we can ride the storm and throw lightning without immolating is to forget we are channeling gods.
This is the strength of Mercury in Pisces. It is the mind of the poet, believing it is asleep when it is awake, and so it has the audacity to do impossible things by accident. Its strength, however, is also its downfall. Pisces is a mirror that never shows you anything but what you want to see. What are those shadows on the wall? A flock of birds or the coming storm?
