Zombies

Addendum #39

Someone asks me how I am. A host of “d” words assault me: damaged, disillusioned, despondent, disheveled, dented. What is it with the letter “d”? What hard darkness resides in that sound? Are these words the result of my over seventy years on Earth? But what if I were a rock or a desert, the stuff of millennia? The words, however, tell me I am not.

I tell people I keep writing essays. I say it is like bailing water on a sinking ship. Perhaps they believe my simile, perhaps not because it is too unpleasant or mundane or self-pitying. After all, some bromide or distraction is usually at hand to forestall such low flights of fancy. And I like to write, as the present instance shows. Words inveigle me, how they are always running away, how many of them there are, how they live their own lives and have no need of me. And what could I say to them?

Every now and then I write a poem that speaks to how I am. I don’t answer people with a poem when they ask me how I am. That would be impolite, overbearing. Still, on the page, anything goes – tap, tango, waltz. Here is a recent poem entitled “Zombies (2025)”:

A zombie starts to tell a joke

but cannot remember what humor is

A zombie gives a political speech:

the living are sucking the marrow from the dead

A zombie puts on a toupee

backwards looks better

A zombie points a gun pulls the trigger

no sound

A zombie falls asleep

and dreams of the Ultimate Torpor

A zombie invents a modern dance

“movement without feet”

A zombie becomes bored

what to do when suicide is outmoded?

Such was the ending that came to me. I look at the faces of the dead children of Gaza and I look some more and then out of cowardice I stop looking but what replaces the faces is another sort of hell – the reasons for making dead children. I know the world has never lacked in that department. The ancient Athenians in their imperial glory would put all the males to the sword and enslave the woman and children. Someone might raise a hand and point out that they didn’t murder the children but many times in many places everyone was murdered, person by person, sword blow by sword blow. And the past tense is a conceit on my part, a negligence, as is my avoidance of the unhappy constellation of feelings that underlies the reasons – arrogance, humiliation, and vengeance.

Thus when I am asked how I am, the abyss of self opens up, this “I,” the mirage that consciousness allows me and the seemingly weighty momentum of my days confirm, however haphazardly. A poem is, blessedly, not an answer to any known question and instinctively that is where I must go some days, both to read a poem and perhaps to write one. Bearing the unbearable has been the gist of more than one lifetime devoted to poetry. Nothing to be proud of exactly but nothing to push aside in the name of unavoidable duty either. Poetry can take care of itself. Meanwhile, how much does one let the world-at-large get under one’s skin? Perhaps the skin hardens so it is no longer skin but armor. With some people you can hear them clanking along, a pile of walking metal. Or the world-at-large swallows you.

At one point in my life I compulsively read books about World War I because I sensed it was the end of what we grandly and loosely call “civilization.” I knew that such mass mechanized killing portended even greater horrors both as to genocide and the bombing and shelling of civilian populations. It became so easy to kill so many. The inventions, all that Bob Dylan wrote about in “Masters of War” – the gas, the bombs, the airplanes – won and that seems the case with humankind at this point in time, however much we insist we are in charge. The United States does not have a war department; it has a department of defense. Even when the United States invades another nation or engages in a proxy war, we are to understand it is an act of defense. Little wonder I found myself writing about zombies – the living dead with their host of responsibilities, grievances, and alibis, their calm double-talk. I was reading a poem about mummies by the great Chilean poet Nicanor Parra: “One mummy seems to be dancing.” Poems are like that, a dog moving from one scent to another.

It seems that the news rarely contains apologies. How am I? Listening to the grief in the wind.