Free Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins Page A

refuge.
    I did notice a man looking at his watch
    and I reflected briefly on the passage of time,
    then I saw two ladies dressed in lime-green and pink
    and I pondered the fate of the sister arts,
    as they stepped into the street arm in arm.
    Who needs Europe? I muttered into my scarf
    as a boy flew by on a skateboard
    and I fell into a reverie on the folly of youth
    and the tender, distressing estrangement of my life.
The Snag
    The only time I found myself at all interested
    in the concept of a time machine
    was when I first heard that baldness in a man
    was traceable to his maternal grandfather.
    I pictured myself stepping into the odd craft
    with a vial of poison tucked into a pocket
    and, just in case, a newly sharpened kitchen knife.
    Of course, I had not thought this through very carefully.
    But even after I realized the drawback
    of eradicating my own existence
    not to mention the possible existence of my mother,
    I came up with a better reason to travel back in time.
    I pictured myself now setting the coordinates
    for late 19th century County Waterford, where,
    after I had hidden the machine behind a hedge
    and located himself, the man I never knew,
    we would enjoy several whiskeys and some talk
    about the hard times and my strange-looking clothes,
    after which, with his permission of course,
    I would climb into his lap
    and rest my hand on the slope of his head,
    that dome, which covered the troubled church of his mind
    and was often covered in turn
    by the dusty black hat he had earlier hung from a peg in
    the wall.
Memento Mori
    It doesn’t take much to remind me
    what a mayfly I am,
    what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.
    Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
    in a museum does the trick every time
    or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.
    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.
As Usual
    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.
Thieves
    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.
The Guest
    I know the reason you placed nine