that enters his mouth comes out of it.
He is willing to be diagnosed, as long as it won’t disturb his future.
Stretched out, he snaps back like elastic.
Rolled over, he is still right-side-up.
When there is no good or bad, no useful or useless, no up, no down, no right way, no perfection, then okay it’s not necessary that there be direction: up is down.
The dead man has the rest of his life to wait for color.
He finally has a bird’s-eye view of the white-hot sun.
He finally has a complete sentence, from his head to his feet.
He is, say, America, but he will soon be, say, Europe.
It will be necessary merely to cross the ocean and pop up in the new land, and the dead man doesn’t need to swim.
It’s the next best thing to talking to people in person.
The Book of the Dead Man (#2)
1. First Postscript: About the Dead Man
The dead man thinks he is alive when he hears his bones rattle.
Hearing his bones rattle, the dead man thinks he is alive.
He thinks himself alive because, what else would he think?
Now he can love and suffer, as in life, and live alone.
The dead man no longer hears the higher register of the chandelier.
The dead man listens for pedal notes and thunder, tubas and bassoons.
He reads lips without telling anyone, but others know.
He can no longer scratch his back so he stands near walls.
To the dead man, substance and meaning are one.
To the dead man, green and black are not estranged, nor blue and gray, nor here and there, nor now and then.
The dead man has separate sets of eyes for here and there.
In the dead man’s world, all time and stories are abstract.
In a concrete house with real walls, he lies down with the news.
The screen’s flickering pixels are to him eyelets through which the world each morning is laced up for the day.
The dead man rises from his bed at night with great effort.
He is a rolling map of veins, a hilly country built on flatland.
The map of the body is of no use to the dead man.
When the dead man turns his neck, it’s something to see from a distance.
2. Second Postscript: More About the Dead Man
Asleep, the dead man sinks to the bottom like teeth in water.
Whatever came to be by love or entropy, all that sprouted and grew, all that rotted and dissolved, whatever he saw, heard, felt, tasted or smelled, every wave and breeze has its metabolic equivalent in his dreams.
He is the bones, teeth and pottery shards to be claimed eons hence.
He is the multifaceted flag of each deciduous tree, reenacting time.
The dead man will not go away, the dead man holds up everything with his elegant abstentions.
All his life he had something to say and a string on his finger.
The dead man will be moving to Florida or Maine, or sailing to California, or perhaps he is staying put.
He has only to say where he wishes to be, and it can be arranged.
Inside the dead man, there is still a mellow sparking of synapses.
Unsent messages pool on the wavery deck, hit tunes that would last forever, jokes that never staled.
The dead man is an amphitheater of dramatic performances, ethereal scripts now written in the air like used radio signals in space.
The dead man mistakes natural disasters for applause—erosion in Carolina, quakes in California.
The dead man’s shoes are muddy from being constantly on stage.
The Book of the Dead Man (#3)
1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man
When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research his makeup.
He wants to study things outside himself if he can find them.
Moving, the dead man makes the sound of bone on bone.
He bends a knee that doesn’t wish to bend, he raises an arm that argues with a shoulder, he turns his head by throwing it wildly to the side.
He envies the lobster the protective sleeves of its limbs.
He believes the jellyfish has it easy, floating, letting everything pass through it.
He would like to be a starfish, admired for its shape long after.
Everything the dead man said, he now takes back.
Not as a lively young man demonstrates sincerity or regret.
A young dead man and an old dead man are two different things.
A young dead man is oil, an old dead man is water.
A young dead man is bread and butter, an old dead man is bread and water—it’s a difference in construction, also architecture.
The dead man was there in the beginning: to the dead man, the sky is a crucible.
In the dead man’s lifetime, the planet has changed from lava to ash to cement.
But the dead man flops his feathers, he brings his wings up over his head and has them touch, he bends over with his beak to the floor, he folds and unfolds at the line where his armor creases.
The dead man is open to change and has deep pockets.
The dead man is the only one who will live forever.
2. More About the Beginnings of the Dead Man
One day the dead man looked up into the crucible and saw the sun.
The dead man in
