Horoscopes for the Dead

by Billy Collins

  it flows, the deep river of your hair.

  But all of this will come together

  the minute I see you again at the station,

  my notebook and pens packed away,

  your face smiling as I cup it in my hands,

  or frowning later when we are home

  and you are berating me in the kitchen

  waving the pages in my face

  demanding to know the name of this latest little whore.

  Riverside, California

  I would have to say that the crown

  resting on the head of my first acid trip

  was the moment I went down on one knee

  backstage at the Top Hat Lounge

  and proposed marriage to all three of the Ikettes.

  We had no idea, Tom and I,

  that the Ike and Tina Turner Revue would be playing there

  when we stepped out for some lights and drinks,

  but sometimes the tortoise gets lucky, they say,

  and comes across an opening in the chain-link fence.

  With many people sending many drinks

  to our maniacally happy table,

  how could I not feel that I had slipped

  out of the enclosure of the past

  where I used to inch in circles through the grass

  when I wasn’t sunning myself on a favorite rock?

  So the night flew on with its mighty colors

  until there emerged a posture

  of valor and chivalric intensity

  as the music, especially “Nutbush City Limits,”

  became more beautiful and fair, like a bower in a poem.

  And even better was the sound

  I heard when it became clear to those girls

  why I had appeared backstage during a break.

  Yes, the best was the laughter

  of those three backup singers

  in their shiny wigs and short red sequin dresses—

  their sweet mocking laughter

  at my courteous sincerity, my ardor,

  after I had breached their dressing room

  and descended to one knee before them all.

  FOUR

  Cemetery Ride

  My new copper-colored bicycle

  is looking pretty fine under a blue sky

  as I pedal along one of the sandy paths

  in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,

  wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons,

  the Campbells, the Dunlaps, and the Davenports,

  Arthur and Ethel who outlived him by 11 years

  I slow down even more to notice,

  but not so much as to fall sideways on the ground.

  And here’s a guy named Happy Grant

  next to his wife Jean in their endless bed.

  Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds

  a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley.

  And good afternoon, Emily Polasek

  and to you too, George and Jane Cooper,

  facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.

  I wish I could take you all for a ride

  in my wire basket on this glorious April day,

  not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith,

  even trickier than Clarence Augustus Coddington.

  Then how about just you, Enid Parker?

  Would you like to gather up your voluminous skirts

  and ride sidesaddle on the crossbar

  and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?

  I’ll even let you ring the silver bell.

  But if you’re not ready, I can always ask

  Mary Brennan to rise from her long sleep

  beneath the swaying gray beards of Spanish moss

  and ride with me along these halls of the dead

  so I can listen to her strange laughter

  as some crows flap in the blue overhead

  and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.

  Thank-You Notes

  Under the vigilant eye of my mother

  I had to demonstrate my best penmanship

  by thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers—

  little red members of the Coldstream Guards—

  and thanking Aunt Helen for the pistol and holster,

  but now I am writing other notes

  alone at a small cherry desk

  with a breeze coming in an open window,

  thanking everyone I happened to see

  on my long walk to the post office today

  and anyone who ever gave me directions

  or placed a hand on my shoulder,

  or cut my hair or fixed my car.

  And while I am at it,

  thanks to everyone who happened to die

  on the same day that I was born.

  Thank you for stepping aside to make room for me,

  for giving up your seat,

  getting out of the way, to be blunt.

  I waited until almost midnight

  on that day in March before I appeared,

  all slimy and squinting, in order to leave time

  for enough of the living

  to drive off a bridge or collapse in a hallway

  so that I could enter without causing a stir.

  So I am writing now to thank everyone

  who drifted off that day

  like smoke from a row of blown-out candles—

  for giving up your only flame.

  One day, I will follow your example

  and step politely out of the path

  of an oncoming infant, but not right now

  with the subtropical sun warming this page

  and the wind stirring the fronds of the palmettos,

  and me about to begin another note

  on my very best stationery

  to the ones who are making room today

  for the daily host of babies,

  descending like bees with their wings and stingers,

  ready to get busy with all their earthly joys and tasks.

  Lakeside

  As optical illusions go

  it was one of the more spectacular,

  a cluster of bright stars

  appearing to move along the night sky

  as if on a secret mission

  while, of course, it was the low clouds

  that were doing the moving,

  scattered over my head by a wind from the east.

  And as hard as I looked

  I could not get the stars to budge again.

  It was like the curious figure

  of the duck/rabbit—

  why, even paradoxical Wittgenstein

  could not find his way back to the rabbit

  once he had beheld the bill of the duck.

  But which was which?

  Were the stars the rabbit

  and the blown clouds the duck?

  or the other way around?

  You’re being ridiculous,

  I said to myself,

  on the walk back to the house,

  but then the correct answer struck me

  not like a bolt of lightning,

  but more like a heavy bolt of cloth.

  Revision

  When I finally pulled onto the shoulder

  of a long country road

  after driving a few hundred miles

  without stopping or even blinking,

  I sat there long enough to count

  twenty-four cows in a wide, sloping pasture.

  Nothing about the scene asked to be changed,

  things being just what they were,

  and there was even a green hill

  looming solidly in the background.

  Still, I felt the urge

  to find a pencil and edit one of them out,

  that swaybacked one standing

  in the shade in a far corner of the field.

  I was too young then to see

  that she was staring into the great mystery

  just
as intently as her sisters,

  her gorgeous, brown and white, philosophic sisters.

  Night and Day

  Funny how that works,

  the breathing all day then it continuing

  into the night

  when I am absent from the company of the wakeful

  oblivious even to the bedroom windows

  and the ghost dance of the curtains

  but still breathing

  and turning in bed

  pulling the covers tight around me

  maybe caught in the irons of a dream,

  like that one about the birds, but

  more like an evil society of birds

  a kind of neighborhood watch group

  throwing a block party

  with the usual balloons and folding chairs

  and tables covered with covered dishes

  and many children running

  in circles or jagged lines

  only everyone with bird heads, bigger than life,

  even the children with bird heads

  and yes, you guessed it

  the birds up in the trees

  have little human faces

  and they are all talking amongst themselves

  about the cloudy weather

  and the bushes laden with berries

  as if none of it were the least bit funny.

  My Hero

  Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,

  the tortoise has stopped once again

  by the roadside,

  this time to stick out his neck

  and nibble a bit of sweet grass,

  unlike the previous time

  when he was distracted

  by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.

  The Meatball Department

  There is no such thing as a meatball department

  as far as anyone knows.

  No helpful clerk has ever answered the question

  where do you keep your meatballs?

  by pointing to the back of the store

  and saying you’ll find them over there in the meatball

  department.

  We don’t have to narrow it down

  to Swedish and Italian meatballs to know

  that meatballs are already too specific

  to have an entire department named after them

  unlike Produce, Appliances, or Ladies’ Shoes.

  It’s like when you get angry at me

  for reading in bed with the light on

  when you are trying to fall asleep,

  I cannot find a department for that.

  Like meatballs, it’s too small a thing to have its own

  department

  unlike Rudeness and Selfishness which are located

  down various aisles of the store known as Marriage.

  I should just turn off the light

  but instead I have stopped in that vast store

  and I will now climb into my cart,

  clasp my knees against my chest and wait

  for the manager or some other person of authority

  to push me down to the police station

  or just out to the parking lot,

  otherwise known as the department of lost husbands,

  or sometimes, as now, the department of dark and pouring rain.

  Silhouette

  There is a kind of sweet pointlessness

  that can visit at any time,

  say this afternoon when I find myself

  rustling around in the woods behind the house

  and making with my right hand

  the head of a duck,

  the kind that would cast a silhouetted

  profile on a white screen

  in a darkened room with a single source of light

  if one were in the mood to entertain.

  But I am outdoors today and this duck

  has a wrist for a neck

  and fingers for a beak that never stops flapping,

  jabbering about some duck topic,

  unless I rotate my arm and let him face me.

  Then he stops his quacking

  and listens to what I have to say,

  even cocking his head like a dog

  that listens all day to his master speaking

  in English or Turkish or Albanian.

  There was talk of war this morning

  on the radio, and I imagined the treads of tanks

  churning over the young trees again

  and planes hacking the air to pieces,

  but there is nothing I can do about that

  except to continue my walk in the woods

  conversing with my hand—

  so benign an activity that if everyone

  did this perhaps there would be no wars,

  I might say in a speech

  to the ladies’ auxiliary of the Future Farmers

  of America.

  And now it is getting to be evening,

  a shift from blue to violet

  behind the bare staves of trees.

  It is also my birthday,

  but there is nothing I can do about that either—

  cannot control the hands of time

  like this hand in the shape of this duck

  who peers out of my sleeve

  with its beak of fingers, its eye of air.

  No—I am doing no harm,

  nor am I doing much good.

  Would any bridge span a river?

  would a college of nurses have ever been founded?

  would one stone ever be placed on top of another

  if people were concerned with nothing

  but the shadows cast by nonexistent ducks?

  So the sky darkens as always,

  and now I am tripping over the fallen branches

  as I head back downhill

  toward the one burning light in the house

  while the duck continues its agitated talk,

  in my pocket now,

  excited about his fugitive existence,

  awed by his sudden and strange life

  as each of us should be, one and all.

  But never mind that, I think,

  as I grab the young trees with my other hand,

  braking my way down,

  one boot in front of the other,

  ready for my birthday dinner,

  my birthday sleep, and my crazy birthday dreams.

  Bread and Butter

  You could hear the ocean from my room

  in the guesthouse where I often stayed,

  that constant, distant, washy rumbling under the world.

  I would sometimes slide back the glass door

  and stand on the deck in a thin robe

  just to be under the stars again or under the clouds

  and to hear more clearly the dogs

  on the property barking—the brave mother and her pups,

  all white, bearded, and low to the ground.

  And now something tells me I should make

  more out of all that, moving down

  and inward where a poem is meant to go.

  But this time I want to leave it be,

  the sea, the stars, the dogs, and the clouds—

  just written down, folded in fours, and handed to my host.

  Roses

  In those weeks of midsummer

  when the roses in gardens begin to give up,

  the big red, white, and pink ones—

  the inner, enfolded petals growing cankerous,

  the ones at the edges turning brown

  or fallen already, down on their girlish backs

  in the rough beds of turned-over soil,

  then how terrible the expressions on their faces,

  a kind of was it all really worth it? look,

  to die here slowly in front of everyone

  in the garden of a bed-and-breakfast

  in a provincial English market town,

  to expire by degrees of corruption


  in plain sight of all the neighbors passing by,

  the thin mail carrier, the stocky butcher

  (thank God the children pay no attention),

  the swiveling faces in the windows of the buses,

  and now this stranger staring over the wall,

  his hair disheveled, a scarf loose around his neck,

  writing in a notebook, writing about us no doubt,

  about how terrible we look under the punishing sun.

  After I Heard You Were Gone

  I sat for a while on a bench in the park.

  It was raining lightly but this was not a movie

  even though a couple hurried by,

  the girl holding his jacket over her head,

  and the chess players were gathering up their pieces

  and fanning out into the streets.

  No, this was something different.

  I could have sworn the large oak trees

  had just appeared there overnight.

  And that pigeon looked as if

  it had once been a playing card

  that a magician had transformed with the flick of a scarf.