Horoscopes for the Dead (2 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 megalithic tomb.

Again, I don’t want to exaggerate,

but it reminds me of a brand of light

that could illuminate the walls

of a hidden chamber full of treasure,

pearls and gold coins overflowing the silver platters.

I feel like comparing it to the fire

that Aphrodite lit in the human eye

so as to make it possible for us to perceive

the other three elements,

but the last thing I want to do

is risk losing your confidence

by appearing to lay it on too thick.

Let’s just say that the morning light here

would bring to any person’s mind

the rings of light that Dante

deploys in the final cantos of the
Paradiso

to convey the presence of God,

while bringing the
Divine Comedy

to a stunning climax and leave it at that.

When the news came in over the phone

that you did not have cancer, as they first thought,

I was in the kitchen trying to follow a recipe,

glancing from cookbook to stove,

shifting my glasses from my nose to my forehead and back,

a recipe, as it turned out, for ratatouille,

a complicated vegetable dish

which you or any other dog would turn up your nose at.

If you had been here, I imagine

you would have been curled up by the door

sleeping with your head resting on your tail.

And after I learned that you were not sick,

everything took on a different look

and appeared to be better than it usually is.

For example (and that’s the first and last time

I will ever use those words in a poem),

I decided I should grate some cheese,

not even knowing if it was right for ratatouille,

and the sight of the cheese grater

with its red handle lying in the drawer

with all the other utensils made me marvel

at how this thing was so perfectly able and ready

to grate cheese just as you with your long smile

and your brown and white coat

are perfectly designed to be the dog you perfectly are.

It was late, of course,

just the two of us still at the table

working on a second bottle of wine

when you speculated that maybe Eve came first

and Adam began as a rib

that leaped out of her side one paradisal afternoon.

Maybe, I remember saying,

because much was possible back then,

and I mentioned the talking snake

and the giraffes sticking their necks out of the ark,

their noses up in the pouring Old Testament rain.

I like a man with a flexible mind, you said then,

lifting your candlelit glass to me

and I raised mine to you and began to wonder

what life would be like as one of your ribs—

to be with you all the time,

riding under your blouse and skin,

caged under the soft weight of your breasts,

your favorite rib, I am assuming,

if you ever bothered to stop and count them

which is just what I did later that night

after you had fallen asleep

and we were fitted tightly back to front,

your long legs against the length of mine,

my fingers doing the crazy numbering that comes of love.

Every morning since you disappeared for good,

I read about you in the daily paper

along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Some days I am reminded that today

will not be a wildly romantic time for you,

nor will you be challenged by educational goals,

nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you should not miss

an opportunity to travel and make new friends

though you never cared much about either.

I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem

with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not

be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.

And the same goes for the fun

you might have gotten from group activities,

a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

A dramatic rise in income may be a reason

to treat yourself, but that would apply

more to all the Pisces who are still alive,

still swimming up and down the stream of life

or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

But you will be relieved to learn

that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting,

nor do you have to think more of others,

and never again will creative work take a back seat

to the business responsibilities that you never really had.

And don’t worry today or any day

about problems caused by your unwillingness

to interact rationally with your many associates.

No more goals for you, no more romance,

no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,

but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

So leave it up to me now

to plan carefully for success and the wealth it may bring,

to value the dear ones close to my heart,

and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way

though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

I am better off closing the newspaper,

putting on the clothes I wore yesterday

(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)

then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle

and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.

And you stay just as you are,

lying there in your beautiful blue suit,

your hands crossed on your chest

like the wings of a bird who has flown

in its strange migration not north or south

but straight up from earth

and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

I have a feeling that it is much worse

than shopping for a mattress at a mall,

of greater duration without question,

and there is no random pitchforking here,

no licking flames to fear,

only this cavernous store with its maze of bedding.

Yet wandering past the jovial kings,

the more sensible queens,

and the cheerless singles

no scarlet sheet will ever cover,

I am thinking of a passage from the
Inferno
,

which I could fully bring to mind

and recite in English or even Italian

if the salesman who has been following us—

a crumpled pack of Newports

visible in the pocket of his short sleeve shirt—

would stop insisting for a moment

that we test this one, then this softer one,

which we do by lying down side by side,

arms rigid, figures on a tomb,

powerless to imagine what it would be like

to sleep or love this way

under the punishing rows of fluorescent lights,

which Dante might have included

had he been able to lie on his back between us here today.

I spend a little time nearly every day

on a gray wooden dock

on the edge of a wide lake, thinly curtained by reeds.

And if there is nothing on my mind

but the motion of the wavelets

and the high shape-shifting of clouds,

I look out at the whole picture

and divide the scene into what was here

five hundred years ago and what was not.

Then I subtract all that was not here

and multiply everything that was by ten,

so when my calculations are complete,

all that remains is water and sky,

the dry sound of wind in the reeds,

and the sight of an unflappable heron on the shore.

All the houses are gone, and the boats

as well as the hedges and the walls,

the curving brick paths, and the distant siren.

The plane crossing the sky is no more

and the same goes for the swimming pools,

the furniture and the pastel umbrellas on the decks,

And the binoculars around my neck are also gone,

and so is the little painted dock itself—

according to my figuring—

and gone are my notebook and my pencil

and there I go, too,

erased by my own eraser and blown like shavings off the page.

There is no noisier place than the suburbs,

someone once said to me

as we were walking along a fairway,

and every day is pleased to offer fresh evidence:

the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing

one leaf around an enormous house with columns,

on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck

equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.

There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes,

or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.

How can the birds get a peep

or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?

But this morning is different,

only a soft clicking sound

and the low talk of two workmen working

on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.

Otherwise, all quiet for a change,

just the clicking of tiles being handled

and their talking back and forth in Spanish,

then one of them asking in English

“What was her name?” and the silence of the other.

This yellow rubber ducky

afloat in the middle of a blue-green pool

with its red beak and its tail up

is one of those duckies with sunglasses on,