Horoscopes for the Dead Read online

  BY BILLY COLLINS

  Horoscopes for the Dead

  Ballistics

  The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems

  Nine Horses

  Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

  Picnic, Lightning

  The Art of Drowning

  Questions About Angels

  The Apple That Astonished Paris

  EDITED BY BILLY COLLINS

  Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds

  (illustrations by David Allen Sibley)

  180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day

  Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry

  Copyright © 2011 by Billy Collins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Billy.

  Horoscopes for the dead : poems / Billy Collins.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60450-1

  I. Title.

  PS3553.O47478H67 2011

  811′.54—dc22 2010018621

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  for Suzannah

  It was the kind of library

  he had only read about in books.

  —Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Note to the Reader

  ONE Grave

  The Straightener

  Palermo

  The Flâneur

  The Snag

  Memento Mori

  As Usual

  Thieves

  The Guest

  Gold

  Good News

  Genesis

  TWO Horoscopes for the Dead

  Hell

  Simple Arithmetic

  Her

  Florida

  A Question About Birds

  The New Globe

  Girl

  Watercoloring

  At the Home of the Baroness of Pembrokeshire

  Poem on the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Trinity School

  THREE The Chairs That No One Sits In

  Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne

  Two Creatures

  Vocation

  My Unborn Children

  Hangover

  Table Talk

  Delivery

  The Symbol

  Winter in Utah

  What She Said

  Feedback

  Drawing You from Memory

  Riverside, California

  FOUR Cemetery Ride

  Thank-You Notes

  Lakeside

  Revision

  Night and Day

  My Hero

  The Meatball Department

  Silhouette

  Bread and Butter

  Roses

  After I Heard You Were Gone

  On Reading a Program Note on Aaron Copland

  Poetry Workshop Held in a Former Cigar Factory in Key West

  Returning the Pencil to Its Tray

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Note to the Reader About this Poetry eBook

  The way a poem looks on the page is a vital aspect of its being. The length of its lines and the poet’s use of stanza breaks give the poem a physical shape, which guides our reading of the poem and distinguishes it from prose.

  With an eBook, this distinct shape may be altered if you choose to take advantage of one of the functions of your eReader by changing the size of the type for greater legibility. Doing this may cause the poem to have line breaks not intended by the poet. To preserve the physical integrity of the poem, we have formatted the eBook so that any words that get bumped down to a new line in the poem will be noticeably indented. This way, you can still appreciate the poem’s original shape regardless of your choice of type size.

  ONE

  Grave

  What do you think of my new glasses

  I asked as I stood under a shade tree

  before the joined grave of my parents,

  and what followed was a long silence

  that descended on the rows of the dead

  and on the fields and the woods beyond,

  one of the one hundred kinds of silence

  according to the Chinese belief,

  each one distinct from the others,

  but the differences being so faint

  that only a few special monks

  were able to tell them all apart.

  They make you look very scholarly,

  I heard my mother say

  once I lay down on the ground

  and pressed an ear into the soft grass.

  Then I rolled over and pressed

  my other ear to the ground,

  the ear my father likes to speak into,

  but he would say nothing,

  and I could not find a silence

  among the 100 Chinese silences

  that would fit the one that he created

  even though I was the one

  who had just made up the business

  of the 100 Chinese silences—

  the Silence of the Night Boat

  and the Silence of the Lotus,

  cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell

  only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.

  The Straightener

  Even as a boy I was a straightener.

  On a long table near my window

  I kept a lantern, a spyglass, and my tomahawk.

  Never tomahawk, lantern, and spyglass.

  Always lantern, spyglass, tomahawk.

  You could never tell when you would need them,

  but that was the order you would need them in.

  On my desk: pencils at attention in a cup,

  foreign coins stacked by size,

  a photograph of my parents,

  and under the heavy green blotter,

  a note from a girl I was fond of.

  These days I like to stack in pyramids

  the cans of soup in the pantry

  and I keep the white candles in rows like logs of wax.

  And if I can avoid doing my taxes

  or phoning my talkative aunt

  on her eighty-something birthday,

  I will use a ruler to measure the space

  between the comb and brush on the dresser,

  the distance between shakers of salt and pepper.

  Today, for example, I will devote my time

  to lining up my shoes in the closet,

  pair by pair in chronological order

  and lining up my shirts on the rack by color

  to put off having to tell you, dear,

  what I really think and what I now am bound to do.

  Palermo

  It was foolish of us to leave our room.

  The empty plaza was shimmering.

  The clock looked ready to melt.

  The heat was a mallet striking a ball

  and sending it bouncing into the nettles of summer.

  Even the bees had knocked off for the day.

  The only thing moving besides us

  (and we had since stopped under an awning)

  was a squirrel who was darting this way and that

  as if he were having second thoughts

  about crossi
ng the street,

  his head and tail twitching with indecision.

  You were looking in a shop window

  but I was watching the squirrel

  who now rose up on his hind legs,

  and after pausing to look in all directions,

  began to sing in a beautiful voice

  a melancholy aria about life and death,

  his forepaws clutched against his chest,

  his face full of longing and hope,

  as the sun beat down

  on the roofs and awnings of the city,

  and the earth continued to turn

  and hold in position the moon

  which would appear later that night

  as we sat in a café

  and I stood up on the table

  with the encouragement of the owner

  and sang for you and the others

  the song the squirrel had taught me how to sing.

  The Flâneur

  He considers the boulevards ideal for thinking,

  so he takes the air on a weekday evening

  to best appreciate the crisis of modern life.

  I thought I would try this for a while,

  but instead of being in Paris, I was in Florida,

  so the time-honored sights were not available to me

  despite my regimen of aimless strolling—

  no kiosks or glass-roofed arcades,

  no beggar with a kerchief covering her hair,

  no woman holding her hat down as she crossed a street,

  no Victor Hugo look-alike scowling in a greatcoat,

  no girls selling fruit or sweets from a cart,

  no prostitutes circled under a streetlamp,

  no solitude of the moving crowd

  where I could find the dream of refuge.

  I did notice a man looking at his watch

  and I reflected briefly on the passage of time,

  then I saw two ladies dressed in lime-green and pink

  and I pondered the fate of the sister arts,

  as they stepped into the street arm in arm.

  Who needs Europe? I muttered into my scarf

  as a boy flew by on a skateboard

  and I fell into a reverie on the folly of youth

  and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life.

  The Snag

  The only time I found myself at all interested

  in the concept of a time machine

  was when I first heard that baldness in a man

  was traceable to his maternal grandfather.

  I pictured myself stepping into the odd craft

  with a vial of poison tucked into a pocket

  and, just in case, a newly sharpened kitchen knife.

  Of course, I had not thought this through very carefully.

  But even after I realized the drawback

  of eradicating my own existence

  not to mention the possible existence of my mother,

  I came up with a better reason to travel back in time.

  I pictured myself now setting the coordinates

  for late 19th century County Waterford, where,

  after I had hidden the machine behind a hedge

  and located himself, the man I never knew,

  we would enjoy several whiskeys and some talk

  about the hard times and my strange-looking clothes,

  after which, with his permission of course,

  I would climb into his lap

  and rest my hand on the slope of his head,

  that dome, which covered the troubled church of his mind

  and was often covered in turn

  by the dusty black hat he had earlier hung from a peg in

  the wall.

  Memento Mori

  It doesn’t take much to remind me

  what a mayfly I am,

  what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

  Standing under the bones of a dinosaur

  in a museum does the trick every time

  or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

  Even the Church of St. Anne will do,

  a structure I just noticed in a magazine—

  built in 1722 of sandstone and limestone in the city of Cork.

  And the realization that no one

  who ever breasted the waters of time

  has figured out a way to avoid dying

  always pulls me up by the reins and settles me down

  by a roadside, grateful for the sweet weeds

  and the mouthfuls of colorful wildflowers.

  So many reminders of my mortality

  here, there, and elsewhere, visible at every hour,

  pretty much everything I can think of except you,

  sign over the door of this bar in Cocoa Beach

  proclaiming that it was established—

  though established does not sound right—in 1996.

  As Usual

  After we have parted, the boats

  will continue to leave the harbor at dawn.

  The salmon will struggle up to the pools,

  one month following the other on the wall.

  The magnolia will flower,

  and the bee, the noble bee—

  I saw one earlier on my walk—

  will shoulder his way into the bud.

  Thieves

  I considered myself lucky to notice

  on my walk a mouse ducking like a culprit

  into an opening in a stone wall,

  a bit of fern draped over his disappearance,

  for I was a fellow thief

  having stolen for myself this hour,

  lifting the wedge of it from my daily clock

  so I could walk up a wooded hillside

  and sit for a while on a rock the size of a car.

  Give us this day our daily clock

  I started to chant

  as I sat on the hood of this Volkswagen of stone,

  and give us our daily blood

  and our daily patience and some extra patience

  until we cannot stand to live any longer.

  And there on that granite automobile,

  which once moved along

  in the monstrous glacial traffic of the ice age

  then came to a halt at last on this very spot,

  I felt the motion of thought run out to its edges

  then the counter motion of its

  tightening on a thing small as a mouse

  caught darting into a wall of fieldstones

  on what once was a farm north of New York,

  my wee, timorous mind darting in after him,

  escaping the hawk-prowling sunlight

  for a shadowy cave of stone

  and the comings and goings of mice—

  all that scurrying and the secretive brushing of whiskers.

  The Guest

  I know the reason you placed nine white tulips

  in a glass vase with water

  here in this room a few days ago

  was not to mark the passage of time

  as a fish would have if nailed by the tail

  to the wall above the bed of a guest.

  But early this morning I did notice

  their lowered heads

  in the gray light,

  two of them even touching the glass

  table top near the window,

  the blossoms falling open

  as they lost their grip on themselves,

  and my suitcase only half unpacked by the door.

  Gold

  I don’t want to make too much of this,

  but because the bedroom faces east

  across a lake here in Florida,

  when the sun begins to rise

  and reflects off the water,

  the whole room is suffused with the kind

  of golden light that might travel

  at dawn on the summer solstice

  the length of a passageway in a megalithic tomb.

&nb
sp; Again, I don’t want to exaggerate,

  but it reminds me of a brand of light

  that could illuminate the walls

  of a hidden chamber full of treasure,

  pearls and gold coins overflowing the silver platters.

  I feel like comparing it to the fire

  that Aphrodite lit in the human eye

  so as to make it possible for us to perceive

  the other three elements,

  but the last thing I want to do

  is risk losing your confidence

  by appearing to lay it on too thick.

  Let’s just say that the morning light here

  would bring to any person’s mind

  the rings of light that Dante

  deploys in the final cantos of the Paradiso

  to convey the presence of God,

  while bringing the Divine Comedy

  to a stunning climax and leave it at that.

  Good News

  When the news came in over the phone