Horoscopes for the Dead

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

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

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.