Horoscopes for the Dead (5 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How admirable, yet futile,

to be born in Brooklyn in 1900

and to die in North Tarrytown in 1990

to spend all those years inching northward

over the rough pavements of the city

then into the open fields

and through dark woods, cold streams.

So many steadfast hours,

inside his pale, brittle shell—

nine decades

of snail-like perseverance!

After our final class, when we disbanded

as the cigar rollers here had disbanded decades ago,

getting up from their benches for the last time

as the man who read to them during their shift

closed his book without marking the page where he left off,

I complimented myself on my restraint.

For never in that sunny white building

did I draw an analogy between cigar-making and poetry.

Not even after I had studied the display case

containing the bladed
chaveta
, the ring gauge,

and the hand guillotine with its measuring rule

did I suggest that the cigar might be a model for the poem.

Nor did I ever cite the exemplary industry

of those anonymous rollers and cutters—

the best producing 300 cigars in a day

compared to 3 flawless poems in a lifetime if you’re lucky—

who worked the broad leaves of tobacco

into cylinders ready to be held lightly in the hand.

Not once did I imply that tightly rolling an intuition

into a perfectly shaped, handmade thing

might encourage a reader to remove the brightly colored

encircling band and slip it over her finger

and take the poet as her spouse in a sudden puff of smoke.

No, I kept all of that to myself, until now.

Everything is fine—

the first bits of sun are on

the yellow flowers behind the low wall,

people in cars are on their way to work,

and I will never have to write again.

Just looking around

will suffice from here on in.

Who said I had to always play

the secretary of the interior?

And I am getting good at being blank,

staring at all the zeroes in the air.

It must have been all the time spent

in the kayak this summer

that brought this out,

the yellow one which went

nicely with the pale blue life jacket—

the sudden, tippy

buoyancy of the launch,

then the exertion, striking

into the wind against the short waves,

but the best was drifting back,

the paddle resting athwart the craft,

and me mindless in the middle of time.