Incarnate - Marvin Bell

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       1. About the Dead Man and Medusa

      When the dead man splays his arms and legs, he is a kind of Medusa.

      Thinking himself Medusa, the dead man further splays his arms and legs.

      Now he can shake it, toss it, now he can weave a seductive glamour into the source of all feelings, a glamour known to roots and to certain eyeless vermin of interiors.

      The dead man knows the power of hair by its absence, hairy as he was at the near edge of immortality while his fame kept growing.

      The dead man uses the ingredients of cosmetic products made just for men.

      He pares his nails in the background, just as Joyce, the elder statesman of rainy statelessness, pictured the alienated artist after work.

      He snips the little hairs from his nose and from inside the shells of his ears, for the artist must be laid bare in a light easily diverted.

      He wears the guarded fashions of loose clothing so that changes that might offend—the loss of a limb or a sudden hollow in the chest—may go undetected.

      Mortal among immortals, the dead man can change you to stone.

       2. More About the Dead Man and Medusa

      The dead man mistakes his rounded shoulders for wings.

      His shoulder blades suggesting wings, the dead man steals a peripheral glance and shrugs, causing a breeze.

      While the dead man’s nails keep growing, the dead man has claws.

      Once the dead man has lain in the earth long enough, he will have snakes for hair.

      Who could have guessed that the dead man was this much of a woman?

      Who knows better the extraneous ripple of a long yawn?

      In the theory of the dead man, nothing accounts for his maternity.

      The dead man will not move out of harm’s way, nor leave his children, he repeatedly gives his life for them.

      Who else may someday be beheaded by a sword made out of water and weed?

      Mortal among immortals, the dead man strangles the moon in saliva.

      Domed and tentacled, capped and limbed, the dead man resembles a jellyfish.

      Under his wig, the dead man’s waxed skull belies the soft spot on a baby’s head that turns whosoever knows of it to mush.

      The dead man speaks also for those who were turned into stone.

       1. About the Dead Man and Mirrors

      The dead man is a receptacle for ideas, not images!

      The dead man forgoes the illusory world of action for the natural state of existence.

      Hell, the dead man spits on the grotesqueries of artistic effort!

      Orpheus, a notorious polyglot, couldn’t go anywhere without looking over his shoulder.

      The dead man sings songs denied to Orpheus without looking back. The dead man holds a mirror up to nature in which none of it can be seen by whoever stands before it to look—well, of course!

      This is the difference between the dead man and Orpheus.

      The dead man wills his mirrors, his stickum stars, his window glass, his brass kettle, his crystal wristwatch, his flashlight—all of it to Orpheus whose days are dedicated to looking for himself.

      The dead man is reflective, but you cannot find yourself in his eyes.

      The dead man offers neither praise nor blame but permission to follow.

      The dead man, outwardly calm, seethes with a wild enthusiasm.

      The dead man’s mirror shows the bones but omits the flesh.

      The dead man has no use for the kind of mirror in which the moon can cut his hand.

      He presses a coin to the face of a mirror to see how deep the image goes because he admires optical artifice.

       2. More About the Dead Man and Mirrors

      To the dead man, the surface of a lake is a window, not a mirror.

      The dead man sees to the floor of the river where he watches carp and other bottom-feeders eat the darkness.

      He cannot swim but sinks to the ocean floor and crawls while holding his breath.

      When the dead man hovers over a cup of coffee, he sees the grounds and reads in their suspension a prediction of atomization.

      In the eyes of another, the dead man sees a pathway to blameless dreams.

      The dead man misses himself, it is true, but only in the abstract.

      Hence, the dead man shows no mercy to mirrors, his visage suddenly appearing on the surface to those who run screaming from it.

      To those who hated their parents, the dead man takes on the facial attributes of a father or mother and slyly infiltrates the space between the glass and its backing.

      The dead man makes no distinction between smiles 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.

       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:

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