Incarnate. Marvin Bell
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motion.
“I decent ideas crash and burn, sometime, Sometime.”
The dead man sees the leaves sweat before they lose their umbilicals.
2. More Dead Man’s Advice
Between a rock and a hard place, between sleeping and waking, between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, among cattle and chattel—
Oh, the dead man goes straight.
Happenstance the location, circumlocution the path, the dead man towers.
“Unrapidly, you mean to get there, do you not?”
Oh the dead man, consent for resolutions, student of the betterment, refinisher, repairer, partaker of samples with the whole in mind—
Oh, how straight the dead man gone.
“You got blame to give out none, rightchyar?”
“Who,” dead man, “there goes?” what with bearing wonderment.
“Kierkegaard, let’s try,” who proclaims laughter to be prayer, “what with his name lilting, that’s something right off.”
Having the requisites, lacing the particulars, bearing the burdens, tempestuous among frights and nights—
Oh, how slappy the dead man chokes time, Heimlich to make it talk.
The Book of the Dead Man (#19)
1. About the Dead Man and Winter
When the dead man’s skin turns black and blue, he thinks it is winter.
In winter, the dead man gathers and insists, slipping his collective unconscious forward like a blue glacier.
When flowers turn under, he sees the stars blooming above, florid in their icy reaches.
When leaves desert the trees, he reads the calligraphy of the limbs.
The dead man endures material eternity with a shy smile.
The dead man in winter envelops, he encircles, he reaches around him like the possibility of wings on a butterfly.
In winter, the dead man tries on chaos in its fixed form.
His hollow deformity lasts and lasts, his shapely presence maintains the look it was given: that much longer is he gripped.
The dead man knows why the cherry tree waits for spring.
The dead man senses the earth going to sleep, he feels the vast organism within which he is a brainy parasite sputter and collapse.
The dead man waits with the bear in its cave and the rabbit in its hutch in the snow.
To reduce pain and swelling, the dead man takes six months of winter.
The dead man swallows winter, he applies it, he rubs it in, he wears it for support.
The dead man’s head in winter lies like a cabbage in repose.
Under a blanket of dormant weeds, he basks in the brittle formality of the gray salon.
When there is no adversity, no rise and fall, no ascension, no decline, no frost too early, no season too soon, then there’s no planet too unstable, no ship in the sky better than another for the journey of a lifetime.
The dead man’s white flame is the last trace of ash.
The dead man through the scrawny stalks of beheaded weeds offers up the slightest scent of a place where live fish wait to be thawed and roots fall silent.
No one knows better than the dead man the chalk made from common materials that accretes around each organism deprived of water.
The dead man in winter is not just winter.
2. More About the Dead Man and Winter
The dead man in winter is the source of spring.
The dead man turns equally to all seasons with the cachet of a guest only momentarily served and all too soon departed.
What do you mean, not wiping the glass of the dead man’s fingerprints?
What do you mean, disengaging from his small talk to rush to the side of fake heads of state?
The dead man freezes out the relentlessly glamorous, he does not welcome the vain nor host the proud, he turns from photos with too much hair and tilted heads, he absconds before the heat goes on in the bedroom.
To the dead man, all social gatherings are wintry.
To the dead man, a turn of the head leads to an ear full of dirt.
Oh winter, the season of warm hors d’oeuvres and cold counsel.
The dead man is the drumbeat of winter.
Among the frozen, among the polar thinking-caps and arctic questions, among the sled tracks and boot crevasses, among every poised paw print and running hoof mark, among the etched signatures of survival that everywhere mark the surface, the dead man models for eternity.
The dead man in winter is in heaven.
The Book of the Dead Man (#20)
1. About the Dead Man and Medicinal Purposes
The dead man’s press makes a balm of beeswax.
He squeezes nectar from the orchid long folded into a book.
Where the dead man has found the strength to fix his grip tighter is a sensuous mystery.
The dead weight of the dead man, you wouldn’t think it, nonetheless hovers.
The dead man transcends gravity, clinging to the bottom of the earth, then to the top, first one side then another, impervious to the siren call of those frigid planets that patrol the heavens seeking the victims of black holes.
The dead man’s astronomy is to be taken with a spoonful of honey.
To the dead man, erosion is a form of CPR and an earthquake is the natural consequence of the Heimlich maneuver writ large.
Writ large is the dead man’s dosage of tranquilizers and antidepressants.
The dead man’s remedy is to hold still, thus becoming a counterweight to the hyperactivity of government and a counteragent to the passivity of charity.
The dead man fights infection with the same alacrity he once used to effect the peace.
When the dead man sank into the ground for good, a cease-fire prevailed and nonviolence filled the void.
The dead man uses death and dying for medicinal purposes.
2. More About the Dead Man and Medicinal Purposes
When the dead man’s fever breaks, he thinks the earth sweats.
Seeing the earth sweat, the dead man thinks his fever has broken.
The dead man suffers daily food poisoning from spoiled fish buried to fertilize pines, rotted corn plowed under for lack of a price, wastewater weighed by the ton, and countless variations of carbon whose days are numbered seeping from landfills.
The dead man is in the path of sewage plumes, but a cemetery that large cannot be moved.
Thus, the dead man must digest every chemical element to see what works.
In pain, the dead man puts repetitive phrases to an endless melody, he tries gum and mints, he coats his stomach with pink oxides, but the tremolo continues until he feels he will burst.
Now the dead man dines on mustard, now ferns, he swallows fungi unselectively, he sponges up chlorophyll from cut grass.
When the dead man first turned his back and left, he felt green again.
When