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      June 29, 2023What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our StarsDick Westheimer

      Image: “A Lonesome Border” by Carmella Dolmer. “What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars” was written by Dick Westheimer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2023, and selected as an Editor’s Choice.

      [audioplayer file=”https://admin.rattle.com/audio/WestheimerFailed.mp3″]

      The astrologer told us not to marry.
      She said we would burn
      one another in an astrological
      furnace. She traced her finger
       
      over the spider’s web chart
      she’d drawn, showing one of our
      rising signs made of dry tinder,
      and mine, that of a match. Our choice
       
      would be to burn or alternately fall
      into a hole so deep that the only way
      out would be fire. Of course, not even
      this promise of planets in catastrophe
       
      could dissuade us heated lovers
      from each other’s flesh. We had this
      fantasy of one day becoming gray-haired,
      shade-tree sitting folk.
       
      But what is a zodiac sign
      other than a random pattern of stars?
      And what is a horoscope other than
      a dowser with no water to find?
       
      And a star? It is the pressing
      of the smallest parts of us
      until there is fusion, heat where
      once was none—and the stuff
       
      of more stars, or maybe, like us,
      now a quiet binary, living
      out our graying days illuminated,
      mostly, in each other’s orbit.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “The best ekphrastic poems leap into something new without losing touch with the original image, so that it’s often not immediately clear whether the poem or visual art was created first. Like a binary star, they appear as one. Dick Westheimer manages that with a poignant extended metaphor that doubles over itself several times. On its own, the poem is full of memorable lines, but the addition of the drawing makes for a brilliant singular object.”

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