Horoscopes for the Dead

I got out the latest book of Billy Collins' poems from the library yesterday, Horoscopes for the Dead. Happily, it more than lived up to my expectations. He is one my favorite living poets. I liked the poem he wrote about a dead poet's poem:

Memorizing "The Sun Rising" by John Donne


Every reader likes 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 courteous dominion
of her being all the 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.