the reaching of a root, the dead man swells with metabolic anticipation.
The dead man loves the snoring of the sea and the absent-minded whistling of the wind.
He doesn’t need much if it will rain now and then so that the weeds can flourish and a simple buttercup can get in position to sully a nose.
He likes listening to an ear of corn.
He loves the feeling of the wood when he drums his fingers.
He grows giddy at the thought of elk contesting and wolves patrolling.
The dead man does not choose sides between fact and fiction, night and day, beauty and truth, youth and age, or men and women.
The dead man can spend fifteen minutes opening and closing an umbrella, what a contraption!, its cone changes to a triangle and then a parabola, reordering geometry.
The dead man has turned his back on the planed edge of memory, each face from the past now bears the freshness of a cut orange.
The dead man’s blood can be brought to a boil by a kiss, but also by dumb remarks about cows.
The dead man is an outsider by choice, unwilling to give up even so much as the graphite dunce cap of a wooden pencil and how it feels.
The dead man is one example, the rest to be filled in.
The dead man has it all, even the worms and the dogs.
2. More About the Dead Man’s Happiness
The dead man wanted more until he had everything and wanted none of it.
At nerve’s end, the dead man felt frayed and scattered: the profit-takers wanted their share, and the bloodletters, the parasites, the actual doctors, the patient embalmers, the donors, the grocers, the tailors, the candymakers, and himself, too, lunging.
One day the dead man decided to keep himself as he was—sawtoothed, tilted, uneven.
The dead man decided to stay short, lose his hair, wear glasses, get heartburn, be pained, and thrill to his ignorance.
To the dead man, more mystery means more.
More fog, more vapors, more darkness, more distance, more time, more absence—to the dead man, all is everything.
Put it down to the dead man’s love of the watery rays of starlight.
Put it down to the dead man’s lamentations.
One day something in the dead man rose from his body with a creak.
Under blank retinal covers he felt himself fill with happiness.
When he saw that he had displaced his weight in water, Archimedes cried, “Eureka!”
The dead man did the same with substance and shadow.
The Book of the Dead Man (#22)
1. About the Dead Man and Money
Strange to say it, but the dead man needs sleep.
The dead man comes from a long line of people who had to make a living.
Therefore the dead man invests in futures: he eats.
He has working papers, he sells short and lives long, he leverages and hedges, he is himself a product of the gross national effort.
The dead man follows a money trail like an embolus on the long trek to the brain.
Who but the dead man foresaw the collapses of October, March, September, April, December, February, November, January, May, June, July and August?
The dead man’s ledger is red for “ought”-this and “ought”-that, but he counsels not, lest he become the box turtle that tried to race.
His lips tremble with the good advice he withholds.
His knees quiver with the thought that he might someday move.
The thought of making a million sucks his brain dry.
Everything about the dead man’s situation suggests no-load mutuals.
The weight of money makes the skin beneath his eyes sag.
The press of dollars gives him a thick pain in the chest.
His bones are edging away from the spidery fibers of hundred-dollar bills loosed from the pockets of burial jackets.
Inside the dead man’s nose there lingers the odor of clean currency, a minty smell of ink.
Between the dead man’s ears is the noise of hands riffling a wad of bills.
The dead man’s eyes have a greenish tint, on his tongue there remains the residue of a rich dessert, and his skin has the texture of shredded excelsior.
Strange to say, the dead man is like a plate passed among the faithful, and the dead man needs sleep.
2. More About the Dead Man and Money
The dead man made a living—an outpouring of roses at the end.
The dead man made a living—the swaying of poplars by the sea.
The dead man is not blinded by the flare of economic downturns, nor deafened by boom times.
The dead man sees through the whitewash on the floor of the slaughterhouse.
The dead man hears the blood run backwards when the boss stands.
He knows the red mist in the eyes of the cutters when the whistle blows.
The dead man made bread and moola, a wage and a bonus, greenbacks and lucre.
The dead man, like you, fell from the branch when the season had ended.
The dead man, like you, lay underfoot as the pickers passed.
Like you, the dead man went up a tree into the clouds and cut it.
Like you, the dead man was nearly yanked overboard by a net full of fish.
Like you, the dead man, buying and selling, was bought and sold.
The dead man pays cash, he rates each and every economic ingredient beginning with the baker and his dough.
The dead man is certified, bonded, obliged, indebted and exposed.
The dead man’s insolvency is a rush of water from a hole in Hoover Dam.
His deposits are earth, air, fire, water and time, which he draws by the lungful.
The dead man is legal tender, solid as a rock, good as gold.
By his will, the
