The dead man stands still, waiting for the boomerang to you know.
He hears the words of philosophers ricochet among chasms and disappear in
the far away.
His scent goes forth, his old skin, hair and nails, and he
spits, too.
He leans forward to look backward, and the ancient world reappears.
It is the beginning, when mountains, canyons and seas were new,
before the moon had eyes, before paper, before belief.
Anything he says now are souvenirs of the future
From Vertigo by Marvin Bell
AMERICAN POET AND CRITIC MARVIN BELL
(1937-2020)
was born in NewYork City
to a Jewish family
who had immigrated
from Ukraine.
He frequently wrote about distance and reconciliation between people, often touching on his complex relationship to his heritage.
William M. Robins has written that Bell “is a poet of the family. He writes of his father, his wives, his sons, and himself in a dynamic interaction of love and loss, accomplishment, and fear of alienation. These are subjects that demand maturity and constant evaluation.
"A complete reading of Bell’s canon shows his ability to understand the durability of the human heart. Equally impressive is his accompanying technical sophistication.”
But Bell is best known for his Dead Man poems.
He began to write them at age 53; their preoccupation with mortality—already obvious from the dead man’s name—is fitting for a form conceived in middle age. Bell's final collection, Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems, gathers The Book of the Dead Man (1994), Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2 (1997), and Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (2011), as well as five poems from Mars Being Red (2007) and 26 more new and uncollected poems.
Bell died at the age of 83
on December 14, 2020.
Source: Poetry Foundation
|https://www.poetryfoundation.org
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.
Perhaps it's so not important that the dead man lives.
After all, the dead man deserts the future.
-- Marvin Bell
MORE ON MARVIN BELL ON THE NEW RESOURCES PAGE AHEAD
The Dead
Man's Eyes
by Arlice W. Davenport
Paint the dead man's eyes a sky blue
use his unpainted colors for shadows
squeeze the cerulean paste from
serrated tubes
it arrives kinked and torn
smear it over the staircase
and its passage
to the dead man's flat
bereft of all flesh
Leave the remaining paint open on his bed
let others sketch
crude crosses
upon his brow
he ate symbols for breakfast with
his toast and café
at noon at night
he ate one blue bean
chalking his lips and yellowed mustache making sure not a single crumb dropped off
his chin to the floor
A fauvist through and through
he cast wild red glances
at the moon shaped silver from its craters
HE tie-died pocket-pencil holders for the blind
I set my watch by his
daily walks
then returned
the little machine
to its drawer
no need to wind it now
his floorcloths matched Matisse's
a foresight ever blue
(c) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport
Marshes
by Arlice W. Davenport
(In Memoriam Marvin Bell)
I cannot raise this burden
off your back.
My arms
no longer lift;
my spine shoots bullets of pain.
Like Judas and his soiled silver,
my body
betrays me
with a kiss.
Eons from now,
I will not
remember this moment.
Its watershed losses will
drown in details from a new yesterday.
Nothing lasts,
least of all significance.
I project myself
into the future, live it out
only as the present.
Pure consciousness nihilates
realms of Being.
They slosh against my legs
as I slog my way
through sticky marshes.
Each step suctions up
sections of quicksand.
I rise only
to sink back
in the viscous mess
of nature's corpuscles and veins.
I pause to eat and sleep,
tracing signatures
in the sky,
cirrus circles
float aimlessly,
immune to rain's invasion.
Soon I see a way forward,
leading to history's courtroom.
I will be judged insufficient,
then stab my thigh
for life-giving blood.
(c) 2024 Arlice W. Davenport