Dead man and memory
Posted May 28, 2007
ABOUT THE DEAD MAN AND MEMORY
If there had only been a window to the past.
If there had been a smear of belladonna, a hint of an alphabet in the
smoke, a flame licking at the extraneous, a drumroll to
announce the meaning.
The dead man poked his memory as if it were coals.
When he raked the embers, they sweat sparks.
If there had been a glass through which one could see behind
oneself.
If the scissors had not marched inexorably down the seam.
He'd have been happy to scrape by, casting yarns of land and sea
into the soapy foam that kept cleaning the shore.
If there had been a magic pill, a fire-walking epiphany, a panacea
under the photographer's cloth.
Never mind, the dead man has made his getaway.
Like an umbrella wrenched by the wind, like an egg rolling downhill,
like a wagon without brakes, like sirens that won't stop, the dead
man is here and gone.
Where on the globe, where in the cradle of civilization, where in the
garden of figs and exotic mosses, will he find the past?
The dead man rings up the millions who tried.
He gathers the bones and artifacts in baskets, he piles the buttons
and buckles, the knives and numbers, the shoes and boots.
In a twist of fate, under a lilac sky, kin to mica and calcium, the dead
man rests for a moment, considering.
He knows the latest, but he is not telling.
By now there are dead man poems all over the earth.
Dead man and dead woman poems.
If there had never been Dadaism, Surrealism, Existentialism, the Absurd
or the Prophetic, there would never have been a dead man poem.
If there had never been unreality.
If there had been no mind, no knowing that one knows.
If there had not been etymology, if the insects had not multiplied.
If there had been only the affections and affectations of the sublime, as the
sun slid from arc to arc.
If there had never been a post-World War, there would have been no
second dead man poem.
Now nostalgia regrets its big shoes and calloused footprints.
Now the backyards of nature are the gardens of a former world.
For it was dead man nature to separate, to carve out, to homestead and
stake.
It was Dead Man and Dead Woman who came first.
If the water could not breathe, if the steam grew heavy with grit, if the
cloud burst with particulates, if dew encrusted the grass, if eating an
apple became the mask of resistance, the dead man could still pull up
the blanket.
If there had been a floor that did not give way, a philosophy that could sew
a red thread through stone, an underfoot that was glass.
For the dead man looks up and down as he kisses the yellowing clusters
of lilies that signal a breaking fever.
