Sometime after the New Year but before Valentine’s Day, I saw an internet meme on Facebook that said:

Pick up the nearest
book to you.
Turn to page 45.
The first sentence
describes your sex
life in 2012.

Ok, I thought. It being a time of new beginnings, as well as the time of upcoming mild embarrassment about being single on Valentine’s (the grocery clerk asking if you have big plans when you buy a bottle of wine and bag of chocolate for yourself, and you lie and say “Yes, HUGE.” And then you wink.), I was susceptible to this directive. I half believe in horoscopes and astrology. Sometimes I think horoscopes are ridiculous, but other times I scour the internet for anything that will tell me that I have luck or money or love or health coming my way. So, I have decided to become a poetry astrologer for you. Yes, you. It’s all random anyway, right? I methodically went through all the poetry books on my shelves and read every page 45, and then I assigned a quote for each astrological sign. I didn’t choose the first line necessarily, but the stars did guide me to the perfect lines that will predict your sex life in 2012. I give you the best, most edifying selections here. However, if you share a horoscope with an ex-boyfriend, I am sorry. (If you want to know my horoscope, check out Cancer.)

ARIES

Kerri Webster, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, from Benediction:

Have you of late touched ice to your lips or
The back of your neck, as healing or waking or foreplay?

TAURUS

Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, from Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow:

After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering
the worth of what was lost, the cost of which was nothing.
Between myself and where I stood, there fell a distance

only loss could fill, an empty world, a simpleness, its shadows
thrown across my window.

GEMINI

Ted Hughes, Crow, from Crow’s Undersong:

She has come amorous it is all she has come for

If there had been no hope she would not have come

And there would have been no crying in the city

(There would have been no city)

CANCER

Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, from Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds:

Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

LEO

Tony Tost, Invisible Bride, from 5:

If one evening or street passes by, another shall come.

There is always the transformation of environmental events into either
eternal or internal regularities, but a wind still comes in the early
evening hours and the stars and moons get stacked like the colors of a
tin cup.

VIRGO

Lucie Brock-Broido, A Hunger, from Elective Mutes:

One day we will burn buildings together.
One day we will set fire to great things.
It sends shudders down my spine.
In the heat of swing park, we will take boys
down & mingle with them in the brushes.

LIBRA

John Ashbery, Selected Poems, from A Last World:

Everything is being blown away;
A little horse trots up with a letter in its mouth, which is read with eagerness
As we gallop into the flame.

SCORPIO

Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love, from If a Wilderness:

I bought a harness, I bought a bridle.
I wagered on God in a kind stranger—
kind at first; strange, then less so—
and I was right.

SAGITTARIUS

Mark Strand, Selected Poems, from The Dirty Hand:

the clean hand of a man,
that you could shake,
or kiss, or hold
in one of those moments
when two people confess
without saying a word

CAPRICORN

John Berryman, The Dream Songs, from 45:

Their paths crossed

and once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed;
and over an unsigned letter their eyes met,
and in an Asian city
directionless & lurchy at two & three,
or trembling to a telephone’s fresh threat,
and when some wired his head

to reach a wrong opinion, ‘Epileptic’.

AQUARIUS

Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea, from Goodnight Lung:

How do we find a thing which

isn’t concerned enough with us to hide?

PISCES

Jean Valentine, Home Deep Blue, from Separation:

Over and over without a smile
the little walls break up and bleed
pure violence and mend and mend.