Life On The Cusp

Life On The Cusp

With my life half over now I feel it’s time to get off the cusp. How much longer to I need to equivocate between Aries and Pisces? I’m ready to either swim or do whatever it is that rams do.

All these years I’ve been a fish out of water flapping for breath, only half on land mingling with the golden fleece. It’s been an amphibious life, out of the wet, finding my legs to sheepdom yet straying from the herd.

This may account for my preference for un-matched socks or why I keep seeing re-runs of The Agony and The Ecstasy and The Bad and The Beautiful.

Ambiguity is my default position, is that clear? Keats wrote about his version of living on the cusp. He called it Negative Capability; a comfort with uncertainty and doubt without reaching for facts, reason and resolution. When I come face to face with the inexplicable I know I’m getting close to truth.

In an early poem I wrote about friends who went off with Jim Jones I had a line, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Lose doubt and you lose your autonomy. When you have to check your autonomy at the front door you are doomed. And so they were.

As for ambivalence I feel strongly both ways. Baaah as in humbug is the way I might lean on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then sharpen my battering horns in the other direction on Tuesday and Thursday. Cusp-people reserve the right to make U-turns, even cross double yellow lines in their reversal.

Come to think of it I withdraw my petition to get off the cusp. And what better time to sprout than at the vernal equinox when the sun is directly overhead on its way over North America and day and night equipoised?

I’ll continue to straddle the Zodiac; half-splashing around in earth’s aquarium and half-woolly as in the mammoth who roamed and rammed until the big ice came and then finally melted under the stars all Piscied and Aried. Who am I to question the choreography of constellations?