Horoscopes for the Dead Read online

  The Chairs That No One Sits In

  You see them on porches and on lawns

  down by the lakeside,

  usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

  who might sit there and look out

  at the water or the big shade trees.

  The trouble is you never see anyone

  sitting in these forlorn chairs

  though at one time it must have seemed

  a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

  Sometimes there is a little table

  between the chairs where no one

  is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

  It may not be any of my business,

  but let us suppose one day

  that everyone who placed those vacant chairs

  on a veranda or a dock sat down in them

  if only for the sake of remembering

  what it was they thought deserved

  to be viewed from two chairs,

  side by side with a table in between.

  The clouds are high and massive on that day.

  The woman looks up from her book.

  The man takes a sip of his drink.

  Then there is only the sound of their looking,

  the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird

  then another, cries of joy or warning—

  it passes the time to wonder which.

  Memorizing “The Sun Rising” by John Donne

  Every reader loves the way he tells off

  the sun, shouting busy old fool

  into the English skies even though they

  were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

  And it’s a pleasure to spend this sunny day

  pacing the carpet and repeating the words,

  feeling the syllables lock into rows

  until I can stand and declare,

  the book held closed by my side,

  that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.

  But after a few steps into stanza number two,

  wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress’s eyes,

  I can feel the first one begin to fade

  like sky-written letters on a windy day.

  And by the time I have taken in the third,

  the second is likewise gone, a blown-out candle now,

  a wavering line of acrid smoke.

  So it’s not until I leave the house

  and walk three times around this hidden lake

  that the poem begins to show

  any interest in walking by my side.

  Then, after my circling,

  better than the courteous dominion

  of her being all states and him all princes,

  better than love’s power to shrink

  the wide world to the size of a bedchamber,

  and better even than the compression

  of all that into the rooms of these three stanzas

  is how, after hours stepping up and down the poem,

  testing the plank of every line,

  it goes with me now, contracted into a little spot within.

  Two Creatures

  The last time I looked, the dog was lying

  on the freshly cut grass

  but now she has moved under the picnic table.

  I wonder what causes her to shift

  from one place to another,

  to get up for no apparent reason from her spot

  by the stove, scratch one ear,

  then relocate, slumping down

  on the other side of the room by the big window,

  or I will see her hop onto the couch to nap

  then later find her down

  on the Turkish carpet, her nose in the fringe.

  The moon rolls across the night sky

  and stops to peer down at the earth,

  and the dog rolls through these rooms

  and onto the lawn, pausing here and there

  to sleep or to stare up at me, head in her paws,

  to consider the scentless pen in my hand

  or the open book on my lap.

  And because her eyes always follow me,

  she must wonder, too, why

  I shift from place to place,

  from the couch to the sink

  or the pencil sharpener on the wall—

  two creatures bound by wonderment

  though unlike her, I have never once worried

  after letting her out the back door

  that she would take off in the car

  and leave me to die

  behind the solid locked doors of this house.

  Vocation

  As I watched the night sky

  from the wooden dock

  I had painted gray earlier that day

  I saw an airplane fly,

  its red port-light blinking all the while,

  right through the Big Dipper

  nearly clipping one of the stars

  of that constellation,

  which was tilted upside-down at the time

  and seemed to be pouring whatever it held

  into space one big dipperful at a time.

  And that was when I discovered

  poised right above me

  a hitherto unknown constellation

  composed of six stars,

  two for the snout and the four behind

  for the pig’s trotters

  though it would have taken some time

  to make anyone see that.

  But since there was no one there

  lying next to me,

  my constellation of the Pig

  remained a secret

  and a bright reminder,

  after many jumbled days and nights,

  of my true vocation—

  keeping an eye on things

  whether they existed or not,

  recumbent under the random stars.

  My Unborn Children

  … of all your children, only those who were born.

  —Wisława Szymborska

  I have so many of them I sometimes lose track,

  several hundred last time I counted

  but that was years ago.

  I remember one was made of marble

  and another looked like a penguin

  some days and on other days a white flower.

  Many of them appeared only in dreams

  or while I was writing a poem

  with freezing fingers in the house of a miser.

  Others were more like me

  looking out the window in a worn shirt

  then later staring into the dark.

  None of them ever made the lacrosse team,

  but they all made me as proud

  as I was on the day they failed to be born.

  There is no telling—

  maybe tonight or later in the week

  another one of my children will not be born.

  I see this next one as a baby

  lying naked below a ceiling pasted with stars

  but only for a little while,

  then I see him as a monk in a gray robe

  walking back and forth

  in the gravel yard of an imaginary monastery,

  his head bowed, wondering where I am.

  Hangover

  If I were crowned emperor this morning,

  every child who is playing Marco Polo

  in the swimming pool of this motel,

  shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth

  Marco Polo Marco Polo

  would be required to read a biography

  of Marco Polo—a long one with fine print—

  as well as a history of China and of Venice,

  the birthplace of the venerated explorer

  Marco Polo Marco Polo

  after which each child would be quizzed

  by me then executed by drowning

  regardless how much they managed

  to retain about the glorious life and times of
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br />   Marco Polo Marco Polo

  Table Talk

  Not long after we had sat down to dinner

  at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago

  and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,

  one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—

  asked if anyone had ever considered

  applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom

  of St. Sebastian.

  The differences between these two figures

  were much more striking than the differences

  between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine

  I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.

  If, the man with the tie continued,

  an object moving through space

  will never reach its destination because it is always

  limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

  then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die

  from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:

  the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.

  Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died

  of a heart attack.

  I think I’ll have the trout, I told the waiter,

  for it was now my turn to order,

  but all through the elegant dinner

  I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing

  the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian,

  a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances

  to his body, tied to a post with rope,

  even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.

  And I thought of the bullet never reaching

  the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,

  the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,

  and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.

  The theories of Zeno floated above the table

  like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,

  yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth

  delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,

  and after we ate and lifted our glasses,

  we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street

  then walked our separate ways in the world where things

  do arrive,

  where people usually get where they are going—

  where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,

  where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,

  and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your

  arms—

  and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,

  splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,

  that popular subject of European religious painting.

  One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling

  with quills.

  Delivery

  Moon in the upper window,

  shadow of my crooked pen on the page,

  and I find myself wishing that the news of my death

  might be delivered not by a dark truck

  but by a child’s attempt to draw that truck—

  the long rectangular box of the trailer,

  some lettering on the side,

  then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,

  maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,

  and puffs of white smoke

  issuing from the tailpipe, drawn like flowers

  and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky,

  only smaller.

  The Symbol

  Once upon a time there were two oval mirrors

  hanging face to face

  on the walls of a local barbershop

  in the capital city of a country

  running the length of a valley

  lined with the stubborn molars of mountains.

  It’s hard to say how the mirrors felt

  about all the faces peering into them—

  the unshorn, the clean-cut, and the bald—

  their only job being to double

  whatever stands in front of them

  including the cologned heads of customers.

  And when business was slow

  the mirrors would see the barbers themselves

  glancing in to run a comb quickly through their hair.

  Every day except Sunday the mirrors

  received the rounded heads

  and gave back the news, good or bad.

  And the reward for their patience

  arrived at night in the empty shop

  when they could look down the long

  corridors of each other—

  one looking at the dead mirrors of the past,

  the other looking into the unborn mirrors of the future,

  which means that the barbershop

  must symbolize the present, in case anyone wants to know—

  the present with its razors, towels, and chairs,

  its green awning withdrawn,

  its big window and motionless pole,

  and the two mirrors who lived repetitively ever after.

  Winter in Utah

  The road across a wide snowy valley

  could not have been straighter

  if someone had drawn it with a ruler

  which someone probably did on a table

  in a surveyor’s office a century ago

  with a few other men looking over his shoulder.

  We’re out in the middle of nowhere, you said,

  as we bisected the whitened fields—

  a few dark bison here and there

  and I remember two horses snorting by a shed—

  or maybe a little southwest of nowhere,

  you added, after you unfolded a map of the state.

  But that night, after speeding on sleds

  down a road of ice, the sky packed with stars,

  and the headlights of our host’s truck blazing behind,

  it seemed we had come a little closer to somewhere.

  And in the morning with the snow sparkling

  and the rough white mountains looming,

  a magpie flashed up from a fence post,

  all black and white in its airy exertions,

  and I said good morning to him

  on this first day of the new decade

  all of which left me to wonder

  if we had not arrived at the middle of exactly where we were.

  What She Said

  When he told me he expected me to pay for dinner,

  I was like give me a break.

  I was not the exact equivalent of give me a break.

  I was just similar to give me a break.

  As I said, I was like give me a break.

  I would love to tell you

  how I was able to resemble give me a break

  without actually being identical to give me a break,

  but all I can say is that I sensed

  a similarity between me and give me a break.

  And that was close enough

  at that point in the evening

  even if it meant I would fall short

  of standing up from the table and screaming

  give me a break,

  for God’s sake will you please give me a break?!

  No, for that moment

  with the rain streaking the restaurant windows

  and the waiter approaching,

  I felt the most I could be was like

  to a certain degree

  give me a break.

  Feedback

  The woman who wrote from Phoenix

  after my reading there

  to tell me they were all still talking about it

  just wrote again

  to tell me that they had stopped.

  Drawing You from Memory

  I seem to have forgotten several features

  crucial to the doing of this,

  for instance,
how your lower lip

  meets your upper lip besides just being below it,

  and what happens at the end of the nose,

  how much does it shade the plane of your cheek,

  and would even a bit of nostril be visible from this angle?

  Chinese eyes, you call them

  which could be the difficulty I have

  in showing the flash of light in your iris,

  and being so far away from you for so long,

  I cannot remember what direction