and wrinkles.
To the dead man, a mirror is a source, a reservoir of light waves extracted from a world of appearances in which a backward look may cause years of handsomely bad luck.
To the dead man, the world is prismatic: hence, the refraction of each element in the model, each number in the equation, each image, each statement, each crystalline midnight.
The Book of the Dead Man (#13)
1. About the Dead Man and Thunder
When the dead man hears thunder, he thinks someone is speaking.
Hearing the thunder, the dead man thinks he is being addressed.
He thinks he is being addressed because the sound contains heat and humidity—or groaning and salivation.
Isn’t that always the way with passionate language—heat and humidity?
The dead man passes burning bushes and parting seas without inner trembling, nor does he smear his door with blood.
The dead man can only be rattled physically, never emotionally.
The dead man’s neuroses cancel each other out like a floor of snakes.
He is the Zen of open doors, he exists in the zone of the selfless, he has visions and an ear for unusual music.
Now he can hear the swirling of blood beneath his heartbeat.
Now he can fall in love with leaves—with the looping lift and fall of love.
Naturally, the dead man is receptive, has his antennas out, perches on the edge of sensitivity to receive the most wanton prayer and the least orderly of wishes.
To the dead man, scared prayer isn’t worth a damn.
The dead man erases the word for God to better understand divinity.
When nothing interferes, nothing interrupts, nothing sustains or concludes, then there’s no need to separate doing from not-doing or to distribute the frequencies of the thunder into cause and effect.
The dead man speaks God’s language.
2. More About the Dead Man and Thunder
The dead man counts the seconds between lightning and thunder to see how far he is from God.
The dead man counts God among his confidants: they whisper.
The dead man hears the screams of roots being nibbled by rodents.
He notes the yelps of pebbles forced to maneuver and of boulders pinned into submission.
He feels the frustration of bodily organs forced to be quiet.
He thinks it’s no wonder the sky cries and growls when it can.
The dead man’s words can be just consonants, they can be only vowels, they can pile up behind his teeth like sagebrush on a fence or float like paper ashes to the top of fathomless corridors, they can echo like wind inside a skull or flee captivity like balloons that have met a nail.
The dead man serves an indeterminate sentence in an elastic cell.
He hears a voice in the thunder and sees a face in the lightning, and there’s a smell of solder at the junction of earth and sky.
The Book of the Dead Man (#14)
1. About the Dead Man and Government
Under Communism, the dead man’s poems were passed around hand-to-hand.
The dead man’s poems were dog-eared, positively, under Communism.
The dead man remembers Stalin finally strangling on verbs.
And the dead man’s poems were mildewed from being hidden in basements under Fascism.
Embedded in the dead man is a picture of Mussolini hanging from a noun.
The dead man didn’t know what to say first, after the oppression was lifted.
The green cast of mildew gave way to the brown stain of coffee upon coffee.
Suddenly, a pen was a pen and an alligator only an alligator.
A pig in boots was no longer a human being, a dead man was no longer alive though everyone knew better.
Now the dead man feels the steamy weight of the world.
He trembles at the press of the witch hunters, their clothes like night.
He has in his memory all tortures, genocides, trials and lockups.
He sees the lovers of pressed flowers brought down by botanical poverty.
He sees the moviegoers, who kissed through the credits, stunned by the sudden light after the ending.
In the lobby, the dead man’s manuscripts went under coats and into pockets.
Then they all went off to spill coffee and argue ethics.
The dead man is the anarchist whose eyes look up through the bottom of the glass raised in toast.
The dead man is sweeter than life. Sweeter than life is the life of the dead man.
2. More About the Dead Man and Government
The dead man votes once for Abraham Lincoln, but that’s it.
That’s all he’s time for (one man/one vote), so the dead man votes for Abe Lincoln.
The dead man votes with his feet, lashing his possessions to his back as if he were Ulysses tied to the mast to resist the siren call to stay put.
The dead man votes with a gun, disassembling it, beating the parts into scrap metal for farm implements.
The dead man votes with wet hands, a fishy smell lemon juice can’t cut.
He comes in off the boat, off the farm, from the cash register and the time clock to throw down a ballot.
The dead man is there when the revolution stalls in a pile of young corpses.
It is the dead man’s doing when the final tally is zero to zero.
The dead man is the freight man on the swing shift at the end of the line.
The dead man remembers the railroads run down by automobiles, the fields commandeered for storm sewers, the neighborhoods knifed by highways.
The dead man thinks a dead Lincoln is still better than the other candidates.
He knows that death stops nothing, and he hopes to be placed among the censored.
His
