Free Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins

ONE
Grave
    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.
The Straightener
    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.
Palermo
    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.
The Flâneur
    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