Gemini

June is twins—cloudy and sunny; profound and scatterbrained; the traveler wading up a hillside of wild sage to a far tholos tomb on Crete, and she content to settle in at home and roast a sage-scented chicken; the bookworm snuggled happily under the goosedown on still-chilly nights, while the party-giver begins lighting candles for a picnic of sixteen in the Rodin sculpture garden.

The original twins were Castor and Pollux— brothers who aspired to marry the white horse’s daughters.  Patrons of sailors.  One immortal and the other not, so together representing immortality and death.  Both in the end given immortality in the stars, their dual nature written into memory across the early summer sky.

Billy Collins writes of these star-struck twins, the twins “looking off into space as usual”—one a dark space, the other, one diametrically lighter.

Constellations

Yes that’s Orion over there,
the three studs of the belt
clearly lined up just off the horizon. 

And if you turn around you can see
Gemini, very visible tonight,
the twins looking off into space as usual. 

That cluster a little higher in the sky
is Casseopeia sitting in her astral chair
if I’m not mistaken. 

And directly overhead,
isn’t that Virginia Woolf
slipping along the River Ouse

in her inflatable canoe? 
See the wide-brimmed hat and there,
the outline of the paddle, raised and dripping stars.”

—Billy Collins

images:  Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Canis Major)

Joseph Cornell diary describing and illustrating constellations Gemini and Orion

see more Joseph Cornell in Stargazing