Horoscopes for the Dead Read online

  that you did not have cancer, as they first thought,

  I was in the kitchen trying to follow a recipe,

  glancing from cookbook to stove,

  shifting my glasses from my nose to my forehead and back,

  a recipe, as it turned out, for ratatouille,

  a complicated vegetable dish

  which you or any other dog would turn up your nose at.

  If you had been here, I imagine

  you would have been curled up by the door

  sleeping with your head resting on your tail.

  And after I learned that you were not sick,

  everything took on a different look

  and appeared to be better than it usually is.

  For example (and that’s the first and last time

  I will ever use those words in a poem),

  I decided I should grate some cheese,

  not even knowing if it was right for ratatouille,

  and the sight of the cheese grater

  with its red handle lying in the drawer

  with all the other utensils made me marvel

  at how this thing was so perfectly able and ready

  to grate cheese just as you with your long smile

  and your brown and white coat

  are perfectly designed to be the dog you perfectly are.

  Genesis

  It was late, of course,

  just the two of us still at the table

  working on a second bottle of wine

  when you speculated that maybe Eve came first

  and Adam began as a rib

  that leaped out of her side one paradisal afternoon.

  Maybe, I remember saying,

  because much was possible back then,

  and I mentioned the talking snake

  and the giraffes sticking their necks out of the ark,

  their noses up in the pouring Old Testament rain.

  I like a man with a flexible mind, you said then,

  lifting your candlelit glass to me

  and I raised mine to you and began to wonder

  what life would be like as one of your ribs—

  to be with you all the time,

  riding under your blouse and skin,

  caged under the soft weight of your breasts,

  your favorite rib, I am assuming,

  if you ever bothered to stop and count them

  which is just what I did later that night

  after you had fallen asleep

  and we were fitted tightly back to front,

  your long legs against the length of mine,

  my fingers doing the crazy numbering that comes of love.

  TWO

  Horoscopes for the Dead

  Every morning since you disappeared for good,

  I read about you in the daily paper

  along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

  Some days I am reminded that today

  will not be a wildly romantic time for you,

  nor will you be challenged by educational goals,

  nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

  Another day, I learn that you should not miss

  an opportunity to travel and make new friends

  though you never cared much about either.

  I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem

  with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not

  be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.

  And the same goes for the fun

  you might have gotten from group activities,

  a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

  A dramatic rise in income may be a reason

  to treat yourself, but that would apply

  more to all the Pisces who are still alive,

  still swimming up and down the stream of life

  or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

  But you will be relieved to learn

  that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting,

  nor do you have to think more of others,

  and never again will creative work take a back seat

  to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

  And don’t worry today or any day

  about problems caused by your unwillingness

  to interact rationally with your many associates.

  No more goals for you, no more romance,

  no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,

  but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

  So leave it up to me now

  to plan carefully for success and the wealth it may bring,

  to value the dear ones close to my heart,

  and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way

  though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

  I am better off closing the newspaper,

  putting on the clothes I wore yesterday

  (when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)

  then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle

  and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.

  And you stay just as you are,

  lying there in your beautiful blue suit,

  your hands crossed on your chest

  like the wings of a bird who has flown

  in its strange migration not north or south

  but straight up from earth

  and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

  Hell

  I have a feeling that it is much worse

  than shopping for a mattress at a mall,

  of greater duration without question,

  and there is no random pitchforking here,

  no licking flames to fear,

  only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.

  Yet wandering past the jovial kings,

  the more sensible queens,

  and the cheerless singles

  no scarlet sheet will ever cover,

  I am thinking of a passage from the Inferno,

  which I could fully bring to mind

  and recite in English or even Italian

  if the salesman who has been following us—

  a crumpled pack of Newports

  visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—

  would stop insisting for a moment

  that we test this one, then this softer one,

  which we do by lying down side by side,

  arms rigid, figures on a tomb,

  powerless to imagine what it would be like

  to sleep or love this way

  under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,

  which Dante might have included

  had he been able to lie on his back between us here today.

  Simple Arithmetic

  I spend a little time nearly every day

  on a gray wooden dock

  on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.

  And if there is nothing on my mind

  but the motion of the wavelets

  and the high shape-shifting of clouds,

  I look out at the whole picture

  and divide the scene into what was here

  five hundred years ago and what was not.

  Then I subtract all that was not here

  and multiply everything that was by ten,

  so when my calculations are complete,

  all that remains is water and sky,

  the dry sound of wind in the reeds,

  and the sight of an unflappable heron on the shore.

  All the houses are gone, and the boats

  as well as the hedges and the walls,

  the curving brick paths, and the distant siren.

  The plane crossing the sky is no more

  and the same goes for the swimming pools,

  the furniture and the pastel umbrellas on the decks,

  And the binocula
rs around my neck are also gone,

  and so is the little painted dock itself—

  according to my figuring—

  and gone are my notebook and my pencil

  and there I go, too,

  erased by my own eraser and blown like shavings off the page.

  Her

  There is no noisier place than the suburbs,

  someone once said to me

  as we were walking along a fairway,

  and every day is pleased to offer fresh evidence:

  the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing

  one leaf around an enormous house with columns,

  on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck

  equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.

  There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes,

  or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.

  How can the birds get a peep

  or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?

  But this morning is different,

  only a soft clicking sound

  and the low talk of two workmen working

  on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.

  Otherwise, all quiet for a change,

  just the clicking of tiles being handled

  and their talking back and forth in Spanish,

  then one of them asking in English

  “What was her name?” and the silence of the other.

  Florida

  This yellow rubber ducky

  afloat in the middle of a blue-green pool

  with its red beak and its tail up

  is one of those duckies with sunglasses on,

  a cool ducky, nonchalant

  little dude on permanent vacation.

  But this morning he looks different,

  his shades more like the dark glasses of the blind

  and him a poor sightless creature swiveling

  on the surface of the ruffled water,

  lost at a busy intersection of winds,

  unable to see the cobalt-blue sky,

  the fans of palmettos, or the bright pink hibiscus,

  all much ablaze now in my unshielded, lucky eyes.

  A Question About Birds

  I am going to sit on a rock near some water

  or on a slope of grass

  under a high ceiling of white clouds,

  and I am going to stop talking

  so I can wander around in that spot

  the way John James Audubon might have wandered

  through a forest of speckled sunlight,

  stopping now and then to lean

  against an elm, mop his brow,

  and listen to the songs of birds.

  Did he wonder, as I often do,

  how they regard the songs of other species?

  Would it be like listening to the Chinese

  merchants at an outdoor market?

  Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?

  Or is that nervous chittering

  I often hear from the upper branches

  the sound of some tireless little translator?

  The New Globe

  It was a birthday gift,

  the kind that comes on a stand

  and glows from within at night.

  It’s the size of a basketball

  but much more interesting

  with all its multicolored countries

  and its blue pelagic expanses.

  No matter how closely you look,

  you will not see a seabird or a fellow sitting on a wall,

  yet place a hand on its curvature

  and you will feel the raised mountain ranges,

  the bumpy Himalayas under your palm.

  It shows little desire to join the solar system,

  content to remain in this room

  showing one side of itself at a time.

  And it is a small thrill to gaze upon it

  as if gazing through space

  from another planet or a balcony of clouds.

  You can spin it on its famous axis

  and stop it with a thumb

  to see where you might belong in the world.

  Or you can pretend, as I did,

  that your index finger

  would go down as the first index finger

  in history to circumnavigate the earth.

  Just don’t get lost like me,

  lost as a baby dropped in an ocean.

  Oh it’s a good thing I was alone,

  nobody there to hear me shouting

  The Cape of Good Hope must be somewhere, but where?

  Girl

  Only a few weeks ago,

  the drawings you would bring in

  were drawings of a tower with a fairy princess

  leaning out from a high turret,

  a swirl of stars in the background,

  and bright moons, distant planets with rings.

  Then yesterday you brought in

  a drawing of a scallion,

  a single scallion on a sheet of white paper—

  another crucial step

  along the path of human development,

  I thought to myself

  as I admired the slender green stalk,

  the white bulb, and the little beard

  of roots that you had penciled in so carefully.

  Watercoloring

  The sky began to tilt,

  a shift of light toward the higher clouds,

  so I seized my brush

  and dipped my little cup in the stream,

  but once I streaked the paper gray

  with a hint of green,

  water began to slide down the page,

  rivulets looking for a river.

  And again, I was too late—

  then the sky made another turn,

  this time as if to face a mirror

  held in the outstretched arm of a god.

  At the Home of the Baroness of Pembrokeshire

  The bedroom that was mine for the night

  was as delicate

  as a room on a page in Flaubert.

  The bedclothes were pulled so taut

  I slept outside the covers

  trying not to dream, trying to be invisible.

  When I smoked a cigarette in the dark,

  I flicked the ashes out the top

  of a lowered bathroom window.

  Whenever I crossed the room,

  I feared the furniture

  would shatter in the wake of my passing.

  If one of the roses in the Chinese vase

  is now less aromatic than the others,

  blame it on the furtive sniff I took.

  Tiptoeing down for breakfast,

  I regretted only the pigeons I had let in

  after all their bobbing and moaning on the sill.

  Poem on the Three Hundredth

  Anniversary of the Trinity School

  When a man asked me to look back three hundred years

  Over the hilly landscape of America,

  I must have picked up the wrong pen,

  The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.

  So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse

  Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,

  A sight we might have seen so many years ago—

  Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace—

  Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,

  The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,

  Which I climbed and then could see even more,

  A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.

  The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,

  And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,

  Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,

  Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without

  bridges.

  And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,r />
  Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,

  Three hundred of them, one for every school year

  Walking single-file over the decades into the present.

  I thought of the pages they had filled

  With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,

  The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,

  The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.

  And then I heard their singing, all those voices

  Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years

  Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,

  History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.

  THREE