Incarnate. Marvin Bell
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house wrens.
“Perfected fallibility”: that’s the key, the solace, the right number (one of one, two of two, three of three, etc.). Hence, the fragment is more than the whole. The Dead Man is a material mystic. His hourglass is bottomless. No. 27 (“About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man”) reminds us that the Dead Man is “a postscript to closure,” and “the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin’s-egg-blue to future generations.”
Has it not already been stated of the Dead Man in the poem “About the Dead Man and His Poetry” that he is the tautologist, the postscript, perfected fallibility, etc.? Yes. The Dead Man tells the truth the first time. The Dead Man, too, writes as he has to—with a watch cap and a sweatshirt, with a leaking skull and dilapidated lungs, at an hour beyond clocks. He lives on hunger. He eats his words.
Before the birth of the Dead Man, it was not possible to return. It was not possible, it was preconceptual, it was discretionary to the point of chaos and accident to return, since of course there was nowhere yet to return to. Since the birth of the Dead Man, however, it is possible, even likely, that one may return. From the future, one walks ever more slowly into the past.
All this the Dead Man knows. As for me, I know nothing. But do not think one can know nothing so easily. It has taken me many years.
M. B.
The Book of the Dead Man
The Book of the Dead Man (#1)
1. About the Dead Man
The dead man thinks he is alive when he sees blood in his stool.
Seeing blood in his stool, the dead man thinks he is alive.
He thinks himself alive because he has no future.
Isn’t that the way it always was, the way of life?
Now, as in life, he can call to people who will not answer.
Life looks like a white desert, a blaze of today in which nothing distinct can be made out, seen.
To the dead man, guilt and fear are indistinguishable.
The dead man cannot make out the spider at the center of its web.
He cannot see the eyelets in his shoes and so wears them unlaced.
He reads the large type and skips the fine print.
His vision surrounds a single tree, lost as he is in a forest.
From his porcelain living quarters, he looks out at a fiery plain.
His face is pressed against a frameless window.
Unable to look inside, unwilling to look outside, the man who is dead is like a useless gift in its box waiting.
It will have its yearly anniversary, but it would be wrong to call it a holiday.
2. More About the Dead Man
The dead man can balance a glass of water on his head without trembling.
He awaits the autopsy on the body discovered on the beach beneath the cliff.
Whatever passes through the dead man’s mouth is expressed.
Everything that enters his mouth comes out of it.
He is willing to be diagnosed, as long as it won’t disturb his future.
Stretched out, he snaps back like elastic.
Rolled over, he is still right-side-up.
When there is no good or bad, no useful or useless, no up, no down, no right way, no perfection, then okay it’s not necessary that there be direction: up is down.
The dead man has the rest of his life to wait for color.
He finally has a bird’s-eye view of the white-hot sun.
He finally has a complete sentence, from his head to his feet.
He is, say, America, but he will soon be, say, Europe.
It will be necessary merely to cross the ocean and pop up in the new land, and the dead man doesn’t need to swim.
It’s the next best thing to talking to people in person.
The Book of the Dead Man (#2)
1. First Postscript: About the Dead Man
The dead man thinks he is alive when he hears his bones rattle.
Hearing his bones rattle, the dead man thinks he is alive.
He thinks himself alive because, what else would he think?
Now he can love and suffer, as in life, and live alone.
The dead man no longer hears the higher register of the chandelier.
The dead man listens for pedal notes and thunder, tubas and bassoons.
He reads lips without telling anyone, but others know.
He can no longer scratch his back so he stands near walls.
To the dead man, substance and meaning are one.
To the dead man, green and black are not estranged, nor blue and gray, nor here and there, nor now and then.
The dead man has separate sets of eyes for here and there.
In the dead man’s world, all time and stories are abstract.
In a concrete house with real walls, he lies down with the news.
The screen’s flickering pixels are to him eyelets through which the world each morning is laced up for the day.
The dead man rises from his bed at night with great effort.
He is a rolling map of veins, a hilly country built on flatland.
The map of the body is of no use to the dead man.
When the dead man turns his neck, it’s something to see from a distance.
2. Second Postscript: More About the Dead Man
Asleep, the dead man sinks to the bottom like teeth in water.
Whatever came to be by love or entropy, all that sprouted and grew, all that rotted and dissolved, whatever he saw, heard, felt, tasted or smelled, every wave and breeze has its metabolic equivalent in his dreams.
He is the bones, teeth and pottery shards to be claimed eons hence.
He is the multifaceted flag of each deciduous tree, reenacting time.
The dead man will not go away, the dead man holds up everything with his elegant abstentions.
All his life he had something to say and a string on his finger.
The dead man will be moving to Florida or Maine, or sailing to California, or perhaps he is staying put.
He has only to say where he wishes to be, and it can be arranged.
Inside the dead man, there is still a mellow sparking of synapses.
Unsent messages pool on the wavery deck, hit tunes that would last forever, jokes that never staled.
The dead man is an amphitheater of dramatic performances, ethereal scripts now written in the air like used radio signals in space.
The dead man mistakes natural disasters for applause—erosion in Carolina, quakes in California.
The dead man’s shoes are muddy from being constantly on stage.
The Book of the Dead Man (#3)
1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man
When