Horoscopes for the Dead
Read Horoscopes for the Dead Online
Authors: Billy Collins
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.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
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
v3.1
for Suzannah
It was the kind of library
he had only read about in books.
—Alan Bennett,
The Uncommon Reader
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.
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.
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.
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 crossing 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.
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 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.
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.
