Incarnate. Marvin Bell

soil, now he ploughs, now he rips away the artificial crops to roll about in the glowing fungi.

      In his study, in his box, in his prison, in his socks, the dead man returns to the land from which he was raised.

      The dead man bought the farm, his number was up, he was supposed to be done for, he had reached the end of the trail.

      The dead man lives on hunger because, what is more filling?

       2. More About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man

      The dead man thinks he is satisfied when he is satiated, a mistake.

      He thinks himself fulfilled when he is no longer hungry, an error.

      Now his eyeballs burn, his skull leaks, and his skin pales upwards from his wrists.

      Now the words—first words, last words—come to life on their own.

      Here is “insect,” the truly meek of the earth, inheriting the ink.

      Here is “vinegar,” the aftertaste of pleasure, soaking into the paper.

      Here are “bones” and “love” getting together, and minerals ride on the light from stars.

      The dead man wears a watch cap to the lobes of his ears.

      He yanks on his sleeves and unrolls the tattered bottom of his sweatshirt.

      His fever has broken that was induced, and the sweat dries with thermal fury.

      All that remains is The Book of the Book of the Dead Man.

      Valéry, a terminal idealist, abandoned the ideal.

      There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure.

      Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure.

      The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin’s-egg-blue to future generations.

The Book of the Dead Man (#28)

       1. About the Dead Man and the Continuum

      Music stirs the dead man to nostalgia, he bubbles, he ferments.

      Under music, the dead man reflexively labors to bear the past.

      His liver shrinks, expelling the speckled sludge of diners and taverns.

      His spleen sweats off a gray aura of languorous melancholia.

      Dotted half notes and whole notes squeeze phlegmatically from the dead man’s windpipe.

      The dead man’s bones break new ground in solid geometry.

      His blood vessels decant greenish oxides, a lifetime residue of electrolytic conversion.

      Every element disengages, every sinew unwinds, each organ tries to start up to name a tune or recall a face.

      The dead man can’t say enough about particular purples, maybe woolen, maybe hair dye, all twilights.

      He won’t come in out of the rain, he loves the outdoors because of what happened there.

      The dead man sleeps with his eyes open, so eager is he to catch a glimpse.

      He hopes to keep time in place by wearing a run-down watch.

      He attempts to stop the iron filings from lining up after the magnet has been moved.

      He tries to trick the compass by turning quickly, he diverts the wind, he downshifts to mock the continuum with herky-jerky movements.

      The dead man is the funster of metamathematics and metaphysics.

      The dead man has perfected perpetual motion in the form of constant gravity.

      The dead man, in the company of all sentient beings, is on his way home to the sun.

      To the dead man, body heat is something to die for.

       2. More About the Dead Man and the Continuum

      Like Rip van Winkle, the dead man is not dead, he is just sleeping.

      When the dead man’s eyes flutter, it is twenty years earlier.

      He thinks the stuff that comes through the food tube won’t be fully cooked for two decades.

      He believes that the nuclear waste around him is beginning to glow.

      He sees the toxins leaching through the canisters, and the purified water leaking from the survival barrels.

      The dead man takes the future with a grain of salt.

      He bundles himself in contaminated rootwork, donating what he can to the chlorophyll factories.

      He flings himself on the timed-release capsules to keep the earth drug free.

      Rip van Winkle survived through indolence and woke in the future.

      The Hudson was thicker than he remembered, and it carried him back.