Marvin Bell

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (PEACETIME)

                              Live as if you were already dead.
                                        —Zen admonition

1. ABOUT THE DEAD MAN IN PEACETIME, IF AND WHEN

If and when the war is over, the dead man’s days will seem longer.
When the ammo is spent, the funds discharged, when the fields have shut
                    down and the flares fallen, an hour will take an hour.
Time for the dead man lengthens when the shooting stops.
The waiting for the next war to begin can seem endless, though it take but a
                    week, a month or a year.
The low intensity conflicts, the raids and assassinations, the deployments and
                    withdrawals, the coups and revolutions, the precursors and aftermaths—
                    it’s a lifetime of keeping track.
It’s as if the sun fell and fizzled—somewhere.
Then the black, white and gray propaganda, the documents planted on
                    corpses, the reading of tea leaves and bones…
The dead man takes stock in the darkness of peacetime.
The Judas goats stand waiting in the corrals.
We are the sheep that gambol through dreamless nights.
A quietude hangs in the air, an expectancy, the shimmer that some believe
                    presages alien life forms.
The calm before the stampede.
It was wartime when love arrived, yes, love.
It was wartime when the virtuosi performed, standing on their heads, as it
                    were, for peace time is our upside-down time.

* * *

2. MORE ABOUT THE DEAD MAN IN PEACETIME, IF AND WHEN

On a field of armed conflict, in the midst of rushing water, at the lip of a
                    canyon, by the border of a fire-torched desert, in the overdark of a
                    rain forest, where else was there ever but here?
Do you think poetry is for the pretty?
Look up and down, then, avoiding the hillocks that hold the remains.
The dead man, too, sees the puffy good nature of the clouds.
He welcomes, too, the spring blooming that even the grass salutes.
The dead man has made peace with temporary residence and the eternal
                    Diaspora.
Oh, to live in between, off the target, blipless on the radar, silent on
                    the sonar.
To keep one’s head down when the satellites swoop over.
Not even to know when the last war is reincarnated and the next one
                    conceived.
The dead man sings of a romantic evening in the eerie flickering of the last
                    candle.
He whistles, he dances, he writes on the air as the music passes.
It was in wartime that the dead man conceived sons.
The dead man lifts a glass to the beauties of ruin.
The dead man is rapt, he is enveloped, he is keen to be held.

–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

Marvin Bell

DEADLINE

“Bodies left to rot in the bush char in the sun.”
I have to pause the taped replay of the news
to catch my breath. It’s taxing to keep abreast
of brush fires, abuse, disease and war,
and the late-night talk show funnymen mocking
villainy and genius equally to top the ratings.
How deep can our feelings go when the airwaves
rain bodies and the camera pans in focus
the urban homeless in a shower of fast film?
The newscasts are dust in vapors, and a map
where stickpins mark the travels of anchormen.
Art won’t medicate the causes, the witty ennui,
or the downward spiral of dunces who cover
the brown air, the bombers aloft, and sometimes
hit a target before moving on. An army of forklifts
stands primed to carry out the morning headlines.
Today’s evening news expires at midnight.

–from Rattle #25, Spring 2006

Marvin Bell

CREATURES

Am I to save the spider in the bathtub,
who lives in the drain
and can scramble up porcelain as if
its feet are suction, or shall I
be done with it,
as I have been done with ants and snails,
with armed yellowjackets
and the mice and the bats? You
tell me, who among us is not
taking steps that preclude the moral
disquisitions of a study group?
And the honeybees are gone this spring,
who lived next door for the last years
of their keeper’s health. He also
tended the graves of the war dead
at the Fort, and he kept, in an old car,
kindling piled to the roof. After
the operation, he could walk on a walker
but not chop wood. A Navy man,
he would have gone to sea
again, had they called,
leaving the civilian buzz of disquiet
without a thought.

–from Rattle 29, Summer 2008

Marvin Bell

BASHO’S FROG

The plop of Basho’s famous frog
when it leapt into the pond,
thus seeming to pierce the ancient water,
which circled and instantly resealed itself,
offers us the chance
to crack the silence that overtook
the empires and their far flung armies
by hearing again that which
the armies could not kill. So, too,
those who traveled to New Zealand to see
the full eclipse firsthand were able
afterward to feel again the shiver
that overtook the land when the night arrived
ahead of time. And to remember
the cries of the roosters when it was over.
Basho’s frog at the plop!—
it’s the provable moment to be registered
among the plopping and croaking and wind
shaking the cherry blossoms
out of the trees while we were still on the road
going to see them.

–from Rattle #29, Summer 2008