Incarnate. Marvin Bell
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1. The Dead Man’s Debt to Harry Houdini
The dead man thinks himself invisible because of Harry Houdini.
Because of Harry Houdini, the dead man thinks himself invisible.
He thinks himself invisible because, who is to say he is not?
Because of Houdini, the dead man allowed himself to be placed in a box and the box nailed shut.
Because of Houdini, the dead man lay down after waving valiantly to the crowd.
Because of Houdini, because of Harry Houdini, the dead man holds his breath.
The dead man is like the apocryphal yogi, inhaling but once, exhaling at the door to eternity.
The dead man can whittle a bone into a key, he can braid rope from hair, he can pry open a crate with his still-increasing fingernails.
The dead man listens for a word agreed to by Mr. and Mrs. Houdini, never divulged, to be used to communicate from the beyond, a word that can slither upward, a word as damp and airy as the center of a soap bubble.
The dead man mistakes grace for worth, escape for thought, the past for the future, the sunken underworld for a raised stage, nonetheless the dead man will out.
The dead man thinks Houdini is a real Einstein.
2. More About the Dead Man’s Debt to Harry Houdini
The dead man challenges the living to escape from his cuffs.
He accepts any challenge, any imprisonment, any confinement or stricture, any illness, any condition, and each time he lingers in the vise or jaws or jacket or cell before he chooses to appear again, always the picture of unrestricted beauty.
The dead man hides tools under a paste the color of his skin, his teeth are removable tools, he has seen the plans sketched in the dirt.
The dead man, like Houdini, is a locksmith by trade, a prisoner by vocation, an escapee by design.
The dead man has as many layers as an onion, as many tricks as there are trades, as many seeds as a melon, as many weathers as there are winds.
The dead man is dying to get out of tight situations using the technique of atomization.
The dead man may agree to lie in a frozen nest, to cling to a seashell rinsed of life, or to hang in the ether, but then the dreams come and he goes flying.
Like Houdini, the dead man has no intentions, only circumstances.
The dead man thinks Houdini the Einstein of escape artists, what with his youthful brilliance and his redefinition of the universe into here and hidden.
The dead man’s broken wings deny gravity.
The Book of the Dead Man (#17)
1. About the Dead Man and Dreams
“Enough,” says the dead man, grinding his teeth, checking his bite.
“Enough,” the dead man says again, with his lips met loosely and his teeth apart so that the hum resonates, a choral trick.
The dead man’s music-to-the-max, he has the diaphragm to sustain high notes, he has the embouchure to flutter and slur, he has the circular breathing to eliminate rests.
Hipsters, bohemians all gather fully themselves in mid-century past to hear the dead man blow.
There’s jazz there, and the dead man spots the spilled coffee of poets rambunctious for Ionics, potters who pull from the inside out, painters of inverse volumes, sculptors freeing prisoners from stone, it’s a time when plenty get it.
Getting it’s the secret, ask the dead man, technique is epiphanic.
Upping the ante’s the secret, ask the dead man, vision costs.
Swinging after midnight, grooving at 2, being hot or cool, knowing the body, indulging in a feisty surrender—ask the dead man, his secrets are out in the open.
The dead man disdains metabolic hooey.
The dead man is always in motion, like a pebble dropped into a lake, like a finger stuck into an eye, like a permanent wish.
The dead man sings and plays as well in sleep as awake, he positively trumpets down the walls of times past.
The dead man dreams of the intimate, animated toys of childhood, through which pass the pensive clouds of adolescence resembling things removed to a safe distance, and the icons of free logic: sad-eyed violins, ships navigating the equator inside bottles, messages written in lemon juice, screaming candles and such.
Whoever comes before the dead man for judgment, he shall be judged.
The dead man fingers the suspect, he has nothing to hide.
To the dead man, logic is the light inside the crystal, refracted, unavailable otherwise.
The dead man takes a hammer to a piece of coal to let out a diamond.
He squeezes an ornament at Christmas to reveal the blood that was inside.
He creases the water at flood stage, he shoulders the blame, he interrupts, he insists, he bends light.
2. More About the Dead Man and Dreams
To the dead man, North Dakota is in the closet.
The dead man makes no distinction between a map and a place.
The dead man is glued to existence, he is wishful and watchful but he doesn’t need to know.
Things appear altered in his dreams: milk in black light, footwear rearranged by cubists, friends who talk out of both sides of their mouths like Egyptian figures seen from two sides.
If he could only have been white hair forever!
If he could have suffered indeterminately, seaweed tossed to and fro in sight of shore.
If he could have been a bottom-feeder without having had to die!
Achhh, the dead man has dreams within dreams, he has the claws to grip an altar, he rolls up the dirt, he plies the waves, he rides the wind, he crosses time lines without touching his watch, everything happens at the same time.
From the dead man’s point of view, perspective is a function of time, not space, so to him a dream is a whistle to shatter the known frequencies.
The dead man drinks from a fractured goblet.
The Book of the Dead Man (#18)
1. The Dead Man’s Advice
“Well, I wouldn’t be so hurry if I was you.”
The dead man starts with a wake, halbeit (sic) in salmon time.
“You don’t know tunnel’s end, but hell.”
The dead man catches hisself pigeon-talking, neck over the moment unstill.
Like a pigeon, the dead man’s iridescence aflutter.
Dead man carried aloft messages War-to-End-All-Wars, now extinct.
“What’s rush, what’s linger, neither of none’s the one, where it ends.”
“Who,” the dead man, “wants to know?”
The dead man rubs the leatherette of his Dante, considering Hell.
He riffles the sheets of his Shakespeare, the revenge parts.
“You let catharsis out, you’ve got nothing.”
“Your dreams mature, there’s no childhood, best be dumb.”
The dead man’s got hokey and corny and the dwarfs of ideas that