Incarnate. Marvin Bell

2. More About the Dead Man’s Head

      When the dead man stays up too late, his brain empties out, whoosh.

      When the dead man’s brain makes that sound, whoosh, it empties out.

      The dead man knows it’s late but not how late, he likes the people who come to see him but doesn’t know who they are, he is old and senses that he needs a fresh brain.

      The dead man holds up a skull and addresses himself, like Hamlet, but the words “to be or not to be” ring hollow.

      No tragedy can occur unless the dead man can fall from a high place.

      It will take years to stage the event: a calving glacier, a bursting volcano, a sudden fissure into which fall the flaws of temporal foundations.

      A former tragedian, the dead man undergoes a change of heart.

      The dead man’s laughter increases in the abscesses and hollows, his body is a corridor of comedy, his cavernous hilarity wreaks havoc among the divisive.

      When the comic and tragic split, the dead man feels like Siamese twins.

      The presence of the dead man means two of everything.

The Book of the Dead Man (#9)

       1. About the Dead Man and Nature

      When the dead man emerges in high grass, he thinks he sees his shadow.

      Thinking he sees his shadow, the dead man emerges in waist-high grass.

      The dead man has sewn dunes in Indiana, set pine groves in New Jersey, combed tidal flats in Washington, chipped the rocky flanks of Oregon and Maine, twisted seaweed in the Pacific, constellated Atlantic beaches in fossil teeth: the dead man knows the land firsthand.

      The dead man has been swept by date palms, fig trees, weeping willows, live oak, he has felt beach grass and kudzu, he has crossed lava and baked sand: the dead man’s understanding blankets the planet.

      The dead man has seen the green wink of the declining sun.

      To the dead man, fog is a mirror, a buttress against the distance.

      The dead man’s face appears to him among the clouds.

      The dead man knows what he looks like in all things because, who would better?

      To the question, Why is the dead man the conscience of the planet, the dead man’s refusal to reply constitutes a final why not?

      The dead man’s didactics have an air of criminal vinegar.

      The dead man, thought to be disintegrating, dissolving and deconstructing, all the while has been materializing, coalescing and under-structuring.

      His is the composition of heavenly music, atomic constellations echoing that subatomic groundwork for which he is better known.

      Without the dead man, the sunflower would not proclaim its common face, nor the lily sway into biblical cover.

      Freeze the dead man out and the natural world stops making love and babies.

      But include the dead man, invite his willing reticence that bespeaks essence to the core, and the world oozes with spring and love songs to Proserpine.

      Eurydice depends on the dead man too.

       2. More About the Dead Man and Nature

      Under his Malthusian covers, all is not lost.

      Where survival of the fittest still reigns, the weak shall inherit.

      Neither your friends nor the dead man’s but someone’s shall creep from the dank underside of wishes into the telling gift of then.

      Nor shall the dead man be any the less for it.

      For then shall the dead man come true, in every form of the invisible.

      The hole shall be greater than any particle.

      The present shall be greater than the future and the past greater than the present.

      Such is the dead man’s hindsight that can cap the lily with its own birth, unhook the atoms of a boulder, and turn the sea to seabed.

      The dead man has experienced the future, what others see merely as the dark at the bottom of the stairs.

      All is natural to the dead man.

      “For that is what men do,” says the dead man.

      All men and women are in his thoughts today.

      All are swept by the weeping willow where they lie hugging the dirt to stay low.

      All but the dead man shall bow down before plenty.

      All but the dead man shall bow down for nothing.

The Book of the Dead Man (#10)

       1. About the Dead Man and His Poetry

      The dead man has poetry in his stomach, bowels and genitals.

      In the dead man’s inner organs, poems are born, mate, change and die.

      The dead man’s genitalia have caused him many problems.

      When the dead man’s writing is called “poetry,” he laughs derisively.

      The dead man sees no difference between a line and a sentence.

      The dead man distributes definitions of poetry by reshaping the concept.

      “Oh Dead Man, Dead Man,” sings the nightingale of tradition.

      “Dead Man, oh Dead Man,” sing the masses of sparrows.

      The dead man, like Keats, shall live among the English poets.

      The dead man is perfected fallibility, the dead man shines without reflecting, the dead man is one of one, two of two, three of three, etc.

       2. More About the Dead Man and His Poetry

      When the dead man writes a poem worth preserving, he immediately burns it.

      The dead man burns everything he writes, but pieces survive.

      The fragment is more than the whole.

      It takes its place among the apocrypha.

      The dead man’s poems are studied as if he were Aristotle and their subject catharsis.

      For every book, there is one poem that sells it: a love poem or a life poem.

      The dead man writes a poem to woo them in.

      The dead man doesn’t need to do life-writing. Oh windswept plains!

      In the dead man’s lexicon, a simple word for a thing, such as “tree,” goes everywhere: its roots into history and prehistory, its branches into entropy and time, its leaves into beauty and belief.

      The dead man looks into a cup of coffee and sees the plains of Africa, and of course his face appears too.

      When he looks down, there appear to him, in the panel of such substance as his vision encloses, the matter and the matter-with, events and their nature, the beginnings of inertia and the end of momentum.

      The entire world starts from the dead man’s fingertips and from the front edges of his toes, and in all things possible there is a foreground right in front of his eyes.

      The dead man refutes those who say they have nothing to say, no subject, no data, no right, no voice except they first dip their feet in the Ganges or tramp the Yukon.

      The dead man sees the world in a grain of sand and feels it pass through his hands.

      He is the unblinking mystic of fiber, fluid and gas.

      No manifestation