oxen.
2. More About the Dead Man and His Cortege
Drying, the dead man rises at dawn like active yeast.
At sundown, the dead man descends from that chemical pride for which body heat is the catalyst into the rag-and-wood vat.
The dead man is the chief ingredient in paper and in marks on paper.
Muddy blood is the ink in the leaves of grass.
The dead man’s a craftsman of ivy, vines and the broken lattice.
The dead man testifies to wind, torn bushes and the clatter from the henhouse.
Placing the dead man is difficult, putting him away takes time, he knocks on the walls of a resonant cavity underfoot.
The dead man reappears by first light and last light, in olive light, in queer violet light, in blossoming light, defenseless light, torn light, frozen light, sweating light, and he himself is lit from within.
The dead man has the luminescence of rotting wood.
When there is nowhere to go to find him, no circumstance, no situation, no jewel in the crown, no gem of the ocean, no pearl of the Antilles, no map, no buried treasure, only woods and more woods, then suddenly he will appear to you with a cortege of wolves or foxes in the midst of your blues.
The dead man lives on Socratic dialogue and fungi.
The dead man has plenty of company.
The Book of the Dead Man (#27)
1. About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man
The dead man thinks he is hungry when he hears his stomach rumble.
Hearing his stomach rumble, the dead man thinks he is hungry.
He thinks himself hungry because he doesn’t think he is no one.
The dead man repairs to his study to eat his words.
He lingers to watch the hourglass change from time to no-time.
He leans at the window to look for whitecaps, thunderclouds, the accruing ozone of a low, the yellow cast of tornado air.
The dead man’s bones are freezing, though his skin is room temperature.
The dead man’s nerves will not give up, his tongue refuses to quit, his brain saves up until it sparks, his blood abandons his extremities to go where needed, his pulse suddenly races, even his eyes lean out to feel before they see.
Now his hands fly about to put-his-finger-on.
Now he beats himself about the shoulders to fix his yoke in place.
Now he sinks into the soil, now he ploughs, now he rips away the artificial crops to roll about in the glowing fungi.
In his study, in his box, in his prison, in his socks, the dead man returns to the land from which he was raised.
The dead man bought the farm, his number was up, he was supposed to be done for, he had reached the end of the trail.
The dead man lives on hunger because, what is more filling?
2. More About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man
The dead man thinks he is satisfied when he is satiated, a mistake.
He thinks himself fulfilled when he is no longer hungry, an error.
Now his eyeballs burn, his skull leaks, and his skin pales upwards from his wrists.
Now the words—first words, last words—come to life on their own.
Here is “insect,” the truly meek of the earth, inheriting the ink.
Here is “vinegar,” the aftertaste of pleasure, soaking into the paper.
Here are “bones” and “love” getting together, and minerals ride on the light from stars.
The dead man wears a watch cap to the lobes of his ears.
He yanks on his sleeves and unrolls the tattered bottom of his sweatshirt.
His fever has broken that was induced, and the sweat dries with thermal fury.
All that remains is The Book of the Book of the Dead Man.
Valéry, a terminal idealist, abandoned the ideal.
There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure.
Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure.
The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin’s-egg-blue to future generations.
The Book of the Dead Man (#28)
1. About the Dead Man and the Continuum
Music stirs the dead man to nostalgia, he bubbles, he ferments.
Under music, the dead man reflexively labors to bear the past.
His liver shrinks, expelling the speckled sludge of diners and taverns.
His spleen sweats off a gray aura of languorous melancholia.
Dotted half notes and whole notes squeeze phlegmatically from the dead man’s windpipe.
The dead man’s bones break new ground in solid geometry.
His blood vessels decant greenish oxides, a lifetime residue of electrolytic conversion.
Every element disengages, every sinew unwinds, each organ tries to start up to name a tune or recall a face.
The dead man can’t say enough about particular purples, maybe woolen, maybe hair dye, all twilights.
He won’t come in out of the rain, he loves the outdoors because of what happened there.
The dead man sleeps with his eyes open, so eager is he to catch a glimpse.
He hopes to keep time in place by wearing a run-down watch.
He attempts to stop the iron filings from lining up after the magnet has been moved.
He tries to trick the compass by turning quickly, he diverts the wind, he downshifts to mock the continuum with herky-jerky movements.
The dead man is the funster of metamathematics and metaphysics.
The dead man has perfected perpetual motion in the form of constant gravity.
The dead man, in the company of all sentient beings, is on his way home to the sun.
