Horoscopes for the Dead - Softcover

Billy Collins has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of English at Lehman College, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001 to 2003, and Poet Laureate of New York State from 2004 to 2006.

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,

and the differences being so faint

that only a few special monks

were able to tell one from another.

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 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.
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 me...