the three stars of the living bow of Sagittarius and her suicidal child

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth

                                                                                                            —Kahlil Gibran

 

 λ (lambda) sagittarii: Kaus Borealis

the northern tip of the bow-body-self is lit by an orange star    a giant in her final

stages she is topaz cut from a bonfire   from the flesh of the golden apples of fall

 

she is also known as the keeper of the ostriches but perhaps they meant toddlers

those Arabic astronomers    finders of stars and givers of names and duties    she

 

guards the nearby clusters of stars who are headed to drink from the river of the

milky way   she keeps watch over the ostrich toddlers who  having drunk their fill

 

are returning   she looks over them as she looks over the knuckles of her bow-hand

toward a pink cloud of gas and particles    toward a nebula with an hourglass shape

 

a reminder of our impending mortality    of the birds’ eminent extinction     of hers

of her potential futures:    if she has the abortion    or has the child     or    were she

 

her own mother:   if she has twins    and one girl dies      or if she never had twins

in the first place   or   if she were her own child:     a chimera      born on the cusp

 

of the zodiac   the afternoon of the equinox    would they even agree to be

my mercurial androgyling?    this ambidextrous seam?    both sunwise and

 

widdershins     all extremes if anything?   or would they choose the future  

at all?    

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δ (delta) sagittarii: Kaus Media

the middle star where the hand grasps the bow halfway up     is in the present tense   this

vortexing culmination of once’s and if’s collapsing   (with a huff)   into one moment     or

 

if not a single point   then, into a multiple star system whose primary star is a weak giant

with a furnace in her belly    who burns with the carbonic mass   she siphoned away from

 

her partner   an evolved   a white star   a hollow husk of a once stellar core

still tightly wound but faint and blinking with the ashen glow of old cinders          

                                                                                                                                   

the pair is orbited   eternally by their grown offspring   their three

dim companion stars:   Bittersweet, Chaos and Doubt        

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ξ (epsilon) sagittarii: Kaus Australis

at the southern edge of the bow body shines a blue giant binary system rare and

short-lived    she is  brilliant    is opalescent    is perhaps a bit vain about her rings 

 

the circumstellar disk of dust where her partner and their collective afterbirth

were set aside   shuttered away   being a plain    an ordinary yellow sun  

 

so like our past: my mother and her November coldness and her diamonds and her

turquoise contacts    and my brown-feathered birdness and my August fire    hiding

 

in the dusty attic of my twelfth house   with the twin I did or didn’t have    and kill

or that I wished I met but never will and how all that book learning couldn’t undo

 

the way we were forged upon each other   imprinted duplicates    mother and

daughter and even   my spawn    how we were built from the same   goddamn

 

flesh   the way we were all such thirsty ostriches

each of us    this whole time   and so poorly kept