Dirt Can’t Talk To Dirt
by Robert Vivian
The dead in their listening, the dead in their waiting, the dead feeding the earth one anthill at a time and the dead the first to feel tremors and earthquakes and trains approaching in the distance in what is left of their eyeteeth that used to be revealed in warm or dubious smiles, the dead working steadily at disintegration and decay, D-words of great subtlety and power, the dead knocking on the temple of the heart and playing dead but not acting, no, playing as moss, roots, and dandelions play and the swaying of branches, playing like grass growing shoots of slender greenness curving in the bright air like dervishes in the miraculous alchemy of death transformed into life into spirit in silent gaga refrain so the dead the best way to grow flowers so soft velvety petals may feed on sunlight, and though I walk through a Slovenian graveyard at midnight I will fear no evil because after the first death there is no other and this has been proven by near death survivors who calmly offer reports of a kindly white light beckoning to them, the dead staunch supporters of copious tears they absorb into themselves like blots of ink or wine stains on expensive dresses or sweaters, the dead becoming handkerchiefs we carry around in our shirt pockets or shove into our jeans until we need to yank them out and honk on them with abandon, and I keep learning things from the dead I cannot learn from anyone else, not even nuns or gurus, the dead I knew personally when they were alive and the more formal dead whom I only came by chance to know by walking among their graves in London and Wroclaw, Poland, which is the best past time I could ever ask for, better than golf or checkers or playing the fiddle. And the dead supine in their coffins or incinerated into ashes piled in urns like gunpowder or scattered above a beloved lake or river or the roof of a high rise sometimes blowing back into the face of the one who’s trying to scatter them, which is a breach of good taste and etiquette only to the living who prefer the dead to go where they are bidden and not come back like so much choking smoke, and the dead letting their hair down as it curls all the way beneath them like slowly licking flames of cool, cool fire, the dead with their skeleton hands folded together on bellies that no longer exist so it’s bone on bone, digital, middle, and proximal phalanxes astride vertebrae or pelvis like a stack of strange china and the dead listening again, listening very, very carefully and without the slightest trace of judgment, and the Mexican boy I knew once with one blind eye who told me how a gang of boys attacked him and held him down and slit his throat and left him in a ditch to die but the Lord stopped the bleeding, he told me, and I believed him as I have believed few others though
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