This is a poem in this series of 144 poems that I’m writing based on the dodeks, or twelfth parts, of the Zodiac signs. As far as I know, everybody else calls them dodekatemoria, but that’s a very complicated word to say, so I just call them dodeks.
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Cancer of Scorpio: The Toychest
20° Scorpio 00′ to 22°Scorpio 29′
Think about what Aladdin couldn’t take —
the golden treasure in the genie’s cave.
Swipe just a kopek, and the walls would break
as desert buried both foolish and brave
alike. Yet any treasure has a tale,
a path through time and space, and many hands.
So Arkenstone winds up beside the Grail,
in an old steamer trunk with rotted bands,
carted to Girl Scout camp in ’83 — and this isn’t true gold, but just gold plate,
and hardly worth risking your destiny
to smuggle some trinket past that dread gate…
Yet what mementoes do we store away,
what wonders we hide form the light of day?
Image: A middle-aged person goes through a box of childhood photographs while sitting on a pile of actual treasures.
Important Relationships
- Part of the Egyptian Term of Venus in Scorpio
- Part of the Egyptian Term of Mercury in Scorpio
- Part of Decan II of Scorpio (administrated by Venus): The Crow
Colophon
This is a part of a series of poems based on the dodekatemoria, or twelfth parts, of the Zodiac signs. The dodekatemoria are sub-segments of the Zodiac, each representing two degrees thirty minutes (2° 30′) of arc; there are 144 dodeks (as I call them) in the full Zodiac, or twelve in each sign. Each dodek is supposed to be a recapitulation or miniature repetition or summary of its parent zodiac sign, as though it were filtered through the lens of the main sign.
The Sun crosses this distance of 2° 30′ in about two and a half days, making these dodeks cognate with the Moon, which crosses one sign of the Zodiac, or thirty degrees (30°) in about two and a half days. The Sun’s passage through a dodek thus mirrors the Moon’s passage through a sign, and squeezes a “mini-year” of passage through twelve signs into a single month.
Each series of dodeks begins at 0° 00′ of its parent sign with the same sign, and there are four dodeks in each sequence of 10° degrees. Each poem in this series will give a (my) name of the dodek, its relevant degrees, a sonnet describing it, a 1-2 sentence description of the dodek, and some other information.
