Oh The Dead Man (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

Oh the dead man oh the dead man
He’s a reasonable and sober man
Doesn’t mind the bitter winter cold
Frets not over the chaffing wind
Isn’t troubled by swaying and groaning trees
Ignores the persistent splatter of the rain about the graveyard
Dismisses time as irrelevant
And the portents of time as futile
For what time is and does and doesn’t do
Life was once kindled and secreted and turned into words
Inside his head and issued out of his living eyes
But the skull turned lifeless and hollow
And all sound and words and pictures vanished
Leaving a cracked fleshless sphere with a humming silence inside it
Oh the dead man oh the dead man
Witnessed what life amounts to among the still walking and talking
And plotting ignominy and perfidy against friend and foe alike
One against another ever in the round
And round trajectory of birth and breathing and living and dying
The dead man’s hands are gathered on his sunken chest one last time
He’s having his fill
Of a very persuasive and domestic death
He has been hard on himself and always contrary and arrogant
About the existence and the permanence or impermanence of the soul
And the role of the breath entering and leaving his lungs
Every second of his life
He died dreading what would come
And what his arrogance would cost him


2

The dead insist on their own arrangements
And on their own type of certainty
And the silence that it’s to wrap and preserve and keep them apart
And hide them from the darting and curious eyes of the living
Wretched in their hours of talking and waiting and thinking
And wondering what it’ll be like when it happens
And what comes afterwards
So the dead have revolted and done away with the circumference
Oh yeah the dead contrive and persist and sooner or later
Get their way with the living still waiting above ground
Still waiting and staring at the clouds and the sun
And watching the moon at night and the clouds
And wondering and itching to learn what it’ll be like
When it happens and what comes afterwards
A humming silence has consumed the dead man
With or without his skull he can find his way
He can find and beguile the shadows
He’s learned the alchemy of turning light into water and rocks into air
He’s transmuted the vastness of space
Into a rusting tin can somewhere in Newark’s railway yard
It’ll rain all night and it’ll be raining in the morning
When the yard is again active and trains arrive and leave
The dead man is there among the rank weeds and the tins
And the yellowing and rotting old newspapers and cardboard boxes
This place is his heart now and no one shall come seeking him here
He’s everywhere this dead man this absent man this irreplaceable man
He is as present and ubiquitous and invisible
As trenches of grass and weeds are
And as are puddles brimming with barnacle-colored skies
And watermelon clouds
And all else that is scratched over and retained briefly
And although it isn’t erased everything does vanish
And isn’t to be rediscovered or recreated ever again
Except for the dead man who knows where everything is stored
Except for the dead man who knows how and when everything is catalogued
The dead man demands no reason for the mystery
He is what he is because he belongs with all else that’s been catalogued
And stored away and scratched over the surface of a puddle
One afternoon in October and there’s a blast of artic wind blowing
It’s been dark and cloudy all morning
It’ll be dark and wet and cold for the rest of the day
Logic and reason can’t account for the sequence of events
That deprives one man of breath and chokes his heart
And it’s the dead man who knows this now and keeps it to himself


© J. Noya, 2006