emptor on its head.
The dead man keeps no accounts.
The Book of the Dead Man (#23)
1. About the Dead Man and His Masks
When the dead man thinks himself exposed, he puts on a mask.
Thinking himself exposed, the dead man puts on a mask.
Before he needed a mask, he wore his medals on his chest and his heart on his sleeve.
The dead man wears the mask of tomfoolery, the mask of assimilation, the mask of erasure, the scarred mask, the teen mask, the mask with the built-in oh, the laughing mask, the crying mask, the secretive mask, the telltale mask, and of course the death mask.
The dead man’s masks are as multifarious as the wiles of a spider left to work in the bushes.
To the dead man, a spider’s web is also a mask, and he wears it.
The trail of a slug is a mask, and the vapors from underground fires are a mask, and the dead light of sunset is a mask, and the dead man wears each of them.
The dead man curtained off the world, now everything between them is a mask.
He weaves masks of sand and smoke, of refracted light and empty water.
The dead man takes what the world discards: hair and bones, urine and blood, ashes and sewage.
The dead man, reconstituted, will not stay buried, reappearing in disguises that fool no one yet cast doubt.
He comes to the party wearing the face of this one or that one, scattering the shadows as he enters.
When there is no one face, no two faces, no fragility of disposition, no anticipation, no revelation at midnight, then naturally years pass without anyone guessing the identity of the dead man.
It is no longer known if the dead man was at the funeral.
2. More About the Dead Man and His Masks
The dead man’s mask prefigures all isms such as surrealism, patriotism, cronyism, futurism, Darwinism, barbarism, Dadaism, Catholicism, Judaism, etc.
Many of the dead man’s masks are museum pieces: final expressions from Death Row, those startled at the last second in Pompeii or Dresden or Hiroshima, faces surprised in the trenches, the terror of furnaces and lime, a look formed from suffocation or lengthy bleeding or embalming.
The dead man apologizes for leaving a sewing machine and an umbrella on the operating table.
The dead man catalogues war memorials, potter’s fields, he takes stock of undiscovered suicides, pseudonyms and all instances of anonymity.
The dead man’s masks are composed of incongruous materials accidentally combined and are as rare and wild as certain edible fungi that closely resemble poisonous mushrooms.
He doffs his hat to long hair, moustaches and beards, but does not give himself away.
He greets the grieving, the relieved, the startled, the victimized and the triumphant without letting on.
The dead man’s hands are twice as expressive in gloves, his feet deprived of their arches gain momentum in shoes, and his mask shields him from those who wish to trade knowledge for truth.
The dead man’s first mask was a hand over his mouth.
The Book of the Dead Man (#24)
1. About the Dead Man’s Not Sleeping
The dead man squirms under a cow-jumped-over-the-moon moon.
Under a moon like the one the cow jumped over, the dead man squirms.
He squirms because he remains a child who can’t sit still, who stays up nights until his brain has been wiped clean and his eyes are dry.
He starts over, the dead man does, as a child begins each day.
The dead man in the morning is fresh as a daisy, pure as the driven snow, crisp as a new dollar bill, and he smells like a baby.
The dead man in the afternoon is as dull as dun dirt, he is passive, digestive and ruminative.
The dead man in the evening rummages toward midnight.
After twelve, in the a.m., then the dead man’s lucent eyes look inward, focusing and amplifying the dark to a black hole in a skull.
The dead man is absolutely animal.
Hence, the unmoving dead man stores up energy to such a high voltage that it can freeze you to him.
Hence, the dead man when active tingles with escaping protons.
When there is no balance, no even or uneven, no regulation, no permissible range, no parallax, no one sunrise, then naturally the dead man from a little salt on his tongue may concoct a new perspective.
The dead man sees himself hanging from the hook of the quarter moon.
He watches himself touch his toes around the circumference of the whole moon.
Like the moon, the dead man’s true face is in shadow.
Like the sun and moon, the dead man’s visage is mistaken for a forward-facing attitude.
The dead man’s positive portrait masks the necessary negative, the flatbed of minuses that leads a charge to ground.
2. More About the Dead Man’s Not Sleeping
The dead man’s blood rises and falls with the days: Monday, Tuesday, Duende, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Duende, Saturday, Duende, Sunday, Duende …
Within him mix the essences of all cultures: duende, soul, joie de vivre …
The dead man sorts through pure substances to concoct impurities.
To the dead man, all ingredients are at hand, every division and subdivision of matter, each flavor, each scent of intention—all at the bottom of the bowl, the outcome undeclared.
The dead man’s bones are skeleton keys to history.
Only the dead man can unlock the past.
He is the neutral observer, the truce force, the peacekeeping mission.
His nonviolence belies his years, his pacifism seems an edgy avoidance when we look through our eyes instead of his.
The dead man will keep his word but he will not sanctify it.
In the moaning grass, the dead man hears a vernacular for all time.
The dead man’s teleology is the busybody seesaw of an adult.
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