(After Marvin Bell. Or not.)
Live as if you were already dead. – Zen admonition
About the Dead Woman and Watching
The dead woman is watching.
She wants to hang on.
The dead woman takes long sniffs.
She smells the heat.
The dead woman sits without turning.
She decides that the rain is nothing.
The dead woman wants to be a camera.
She dreams of a hoard of images to snap and keep.
More About the Dead Woman and Watching
The dead woman wants to embrace you;
she is watching as you sleep.
The dead woman smells flowers with gusto;
the dead woman tastes them.
The dead woman has no hat for the sun.
She lets the heat burst on her face.
The dead woman sits in front of the television.
She sits without turning it on: she has x-ray vision.
The dead woman is laughing.
Being dead is nothing like she expected.
For Friday Writings #251 at Poets and Storytellers United, we were asked to be inspired by Halloween or Dia de Muertos. I'm not well acquainted with the latter and have already written enough poems about the former, so my mind wandered to Marvin Bell's 'dead man' poems. Years ago I made an attempt to write in this form; looking back now, I see I made a real botch of it. So I took what I wrote then and reshaped it to be more like Bell's invention, e.g. the first part, 'About,' should be about the inner experience; the second, 'More About,' should concern the outer. Each line should work as a complete sentence, i.e. no enjambment. The overall title and section titles, and the Zen epigraph, also follow Bell's practice. I was thinking that now I've got the idea better, I might try some more. Then I had a look at a whole volume of Bell's Dead Man poems ('Incarnate') and realised I really haven't created much of a likeness, in idea or structure – which is perhaps OK, as I want to write my own poems, not replicas of other people's – but more likely not OK, as I couldn't begin to match his intricate turns of thought. (Not to mention that he doesn't use couplets.) Really I can only say these are 'based on' or 'inspired by' Bell's unique, innovative idea.
I love that each verse expands the dead woman as a character - and that in the final verse you hear her laugh - somehow if she was scarier before that line she seems almost human in the end! Jae
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you enjoyed.
DeleteIncredibly strong images enhanced by the repetition.
ReplyDelete