1. About the Dead Man’s Speech
Will the dead man speak? Speak, says the lion, and the dead man makes the sound of a paw in the dirt.
When the dead man paws the dirt, lions feel the trembling of the pride.
Speak, says the tree, and the dead man makes the sound of tree bark enlarging its circumference, a slight inhalation.
Speak, says the wind, and the dead man exhales all at once.
Whoever told the dead man to be quiet was whistling in the dark.
To the dead man, the dark is all words as white is all colors.
The dead man obliges, he cooperates, he speaks when spoken to, so when the dirt says Speak, he says what erosion says.
And when the air says Speak, the dead man says what a cavity says.
The dead man knows the syntax of rivers and rocks, the one a long ever-qualifying sentence for which no last words suffice, the other the briefest and most steadfast exercise in exclusion.
The dead man is a rock carried by a river, a pebble borne by air, a sound carved into frequencies infrequently registered.
2. More About the Dead Man’s Speech
The dead man is part of the chorus that sings the music of the spheres.
Dead man’s music uses the harmonics and parasitics of sound, in bands of low frequencies caught in ground waves that hug the terrain as they go, and in ultrahigh megacycles that dent the ionosphere and refract over the horizon.
The dead man makes no distinction between the music he hears and the music he only knows about.
There are five elements in the dead man’s music (time, tempo, key, harmony and counterpoint) and two factors (silence and chance).
To the dead man, the wrinkled back of a hand is a score to be read.
The balding top and back of his head are a kind of braille awaiting a blind conductor.
The dead man’s bone-sounds and teeth-clacks are a form of tuning up.
Sad music brings artificial tears to the dead man’s dilated eyes.
All things being equal, the dead man is not fussy about pitch and dissonance.
His inner ear is set to hear euphonic consonants.
The dead man sings in the shower, in good weather and bad, without knowing a song.
He hums the tunes of commercials without the words, sympathetic vibrations.
He has ideas for musical instruments made of roots and feathers, harps that use loose dirt something like an interrupted hourglass.
When the dead man, in a gravelly voice, sings gospel, hammers descend upon anvils.
The Book of the Dead Man (#7)
1. About the Dead Man and the National Pastime
When the dead man sees a rock, he remembers the hidden ball trick.
Remembering the hidden ball trick, the dead man sees a rock.
Now he can pick it up and throw it to no one, the acte gratuit.
Now he can make them pay dearly for the long lead off first.
The hidden ball trick is subterfuge, but so what?, nothing the dead man does violates the spirit of the game.
The dead man practices the decoy, forcing runners to slide.
Running from third for home with one out, tie score, bottom of the ninth, he delays, then bowls over the catcher, letting the runner from second score between his legs.
He steals second, then steals first, second, first, until the catcher throws wildly into the outfield and a runner scores from third.
He throws a potato back to the pitcher after a pickoff play.
He drops his bat in the batting box and takes a miniature step backward to cause a balk.
The dead man feels the spirit of the game in his bones.
He understands the long windup, the walk to the mound, the interval between hit and error, the stopped seams on a hanging curve.
The dead man knows why the players don’t step on the chalk lines as they change from out to up and up to out.
2. More About the Dead Man and the National Pastime
The dead man remembers the great individualists: Ruth swinging just beneath his potbelly, DiMaggio’s spread stance, Williams’ super-vision, Reiser hitting the outfield walls to catch flies before padding, Newsom sitting down after whiffing and then trying to run for it from the dugout, Musial coiled at bat like a question mark, Satchel Paige above all who said not to look back, Lopat’s junk, Veeck’s midget, the spit and Vaseline specialists, the cutters.
The dead man can go on and on if it goes into extra innings.
To the dead man, a good arm means more than a good stick.
The dead man likes scoreless games with plenty of runners.
The dead man stands in the on-deck circle admiring the trademark of his bat.
He sights along the handle, he taps it to listen for cracks, he rubs pine tar up and down oozing with anticipation.
The inning ends before the dead man can bat.
If it takes a great play, a double play, a triple play, no matter what, the dead man beats the curfew.
The dead man died from pennant fever but was resurrected by a Texas League pop-up which landed nearby and which he is keeping hidden until the end of the seventh-inning stretch.
The Book of the Dead Man (#8)
1. About the Dead Man’s Head
The dead man puts another head on his shoulder and thinks he’s a Siamese twin.
He thinks he’s a Siamese twin when he puts another head on his shoulder.
“Double or nothing” is the dead man’s motto.
He has other mottoes: “A stitch in time sews heaven to earth” and “No pain, no end to pain.”
The dead man thinks he’s a Siamese twin because one head cannot hold everything he is feeling.
The dead man has migraines from too much data, pinpricks of discrete events in the metaphysical.
Random neural firings in the dead man produce predictive dreams among an infinite
