Horoscopes for the Dead (3 page)

a cool ducky, nonchalant

little dude on permanent vacation.

But this morning he looks different,

his shades more like the dark glasses of the blind

and him a poor sightless creature swiveling

on the surface of the ruffled water,

lost at a busy intersection of winds,

unable to see the cobalt-blue sky,

the fans of palmettos, or the bright pink hibiscus,

all much ablaze now in my unshielded, lucky eyes.

I am going to sit on a rock near some water

or on a slope of grass

under a high ceiling of white clouds,

and I am going to stop talking

so I can wander around in that spot

the way John James Audubon might have wandered

through a forest of speckled sunlight,

stopping now and then to lean

against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.

Did he wonder, as I often do,

how they regard the songs of other species?

Would it be like listening to the Chinese

merchants at an outdoor market?

Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?

Or is that nervous chittering

I often hear from the upper branches

the sound of some tireless little translator?

It was a birthday gift,

the kind that comes on a stand

and glows from within at night.

It’s the size of a basketball

but much more interesting

with all its multicolored countries

and its blue pelagic expanses.

No matter how closely you look,

you will not see a seabird or a fellow sitting on a wall,

yet place a hand on its curvature

and you will feel the raised mountain ranges,

the bumpy Himalayas under your palm.

It shows little desire to join the solar system,

content to remain in this room

showing one side of itself at a time.

And it is a small thrill to gaze upon it

as if gazing through space

from another planet or a balcony of clouds.

You can spin it on its famous axis

and stop it with a thumb

to see where you might belong in the world.

Or you can pretend, as I did,

that your index finger

would go down as the first index finger

in history to circumnavigate the earth.

Just don’t get lost like me,

lost as a baby dropped in an ocean.

Oh it’s a good thing I was alone,

nobody there to hear me shouting

The Cape of Good Hope must be somewhere, but where?

Only a few weeks ago,

the drawings you would bring in

were drawings of a tower with a fairy princess

leaning out from a high turret,

a swirl of stars in the background,

and bright moons, distant planets with rings.

Then yesterday you brought in

a drawing of a scallion,

a single scallion on a sheet of white paper—

another crucial step

along the path of human development,

I thought to myself

as I admired the slender green stalk,

the white bulb, and the little beard

of roots that you had penciled in so carefully.

The sky began to tilt,

a shift of light toward the higher clouds,

so I seized my brush

and dipped my little cup in the stream,

but once I streaked the paper gray

with a hint of green,

water began to slide down the page,

rivulets looking for a river.

And again, I was too late—

then the sky made another turn,

this time as if to face a mirror

held in the outstretched arm of a god.

The bedroom that was mine for the night

was as delicate

as a room on a page in Flaubert.

The bedclothes were pulled so taut

I slept outside the covers

trying not to dream, trying to be invisible.

When I smoked a cigarette in the dark,

I flicked the ashes out the top

of a lowered bathroom window.

Whenever I crossed the room,

I feared the furniture

would shatter in the wake of my passing.

If one of the roses in the Chinese vase

is now less aromatic than the others,

blame it on the furtive sniff I took.

Tiptoeing down for breakfast,

I regretted only the pigeons I had let in

after all their bobbing and moaning on the sill.

When a man asked me to look back three hundred years

Over the hilly landscape of America,

I must have picked up the wrong pen,

The one that had no poem lurking in its vein of ink.

So I walked in circles for days like a blind horse

Harnessed to an oaken pole that turns a millstone,

A sight we might have seen so many years ago—

Barley being ground near a swift and silent millrace—

Which led to other sights of smoky battlefields,

The frames of houses, then a tall steeple by a thoroughfare,

Which I climbed and then could see even more,

A nation being built of logs and words, ideas, and wooden nails.

The greatest of my grandfathers was not visible,

And the house I live in was not a pasture yet,

Only a wooded hillside strewn with glacial rock,

Yet I could see Dutch men and women on an island without

bridges.

And I saw winding through the scene a line of people,

Students it would seem from their satchels and jackets,

Three hundred of them, one for every school year

Walking single-file over the decades into the present.

I thought of the pages they had filled

With letters and numbers, the lifted bits of chalk,

The changing flag limp in the corner, the hand raised,

The learning eye brightening to a spark in the iris.

And then I heard their singing, all those voices

Joined in a fluid chorus, and all those years

Synchronized by the harmony of their anthem,

History now a single chord, and time its key and measure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 … 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.

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