Talkin' Dead Man Blues and other works by Bill Zavatsky

 

Bill Zavatsky's most recent book of poems is Where X Marks the Spot. His co-translation (with Zack Rogow) of Earthlight: Poems by André Breton won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Coub Translation Prize. Most recently he was anthologized in The Face of Poetry. For many years Zavatsky was the editor-in-chief and publisher of SUN magazine and SUN, a literary press.

 

TALKIN' DEAD MAN BLUES

 

I'm like a dead man--
like a dead man talkin' in his sleep
I'm like a dead man, dead man, dead man,
dead man talkin' in his sleep
Can't remember what I'm dreamin',
but the water in my nightmare is deep

Fell down through that water
to where the water turns to fire
Yes I went down through the water
to where the water burns to fire
The demons stick me with their pitchforks
to shove me toward the blazin' pyre

It was then I met the Devil, baby
The Devil asked me about you
When I shook hands with the Devil, baby,
The Devil up and asked me about you
I never knew you knew him
I never knew that he knew you

I had to ask myself, honey
how did I get me down here.
Yes, I put the question to me, honey
how did I get myself down here
where the killers drink the champagne
and stiffs like me don't even get a beer

[stop time, first four lines]

           Well, since my baby left me
           I found a new place to dwell
           It's not at the end of Lonely Street
           It's deep in the pit of hell!
           You make me so lonely, baby
           You make so lonely
           You make me so lonely, baby
           You make me so lonely
           You make me so lonely, I could die

Down in the hell red hellfire
where people like me have gone
I'm talkin' from the hell red hellfire
where all the bad folks like me have gone
If you're dead it don't mean nothin'
you just a cinder in the dark beyond

I walked up to the bar,
I saw my hero there
I stepped up to the bar
I saw my hero standin' there
"Is your name Robert Johnson?"
He said, "You knew that you would find me here."

He was drinkin' neat whiskeys,
strummin' on his guitar
He drank six neat whiskeys
as smoked himself a big cigar
"Did a woman make a fool of you, brother?" he said
"I expect that's why we both are where we are."

Savior Jesus don't come down here
He don't like a man who sings the blues
Sufferin' Jesus don't come down here
He don't like folks who sing the blues
'Cause the blues belong to the Devil
Down here the Devil wears the blue suede shoes

No more chance to get to heaven
with its angels and its long gold harps
There's no chance I'll climb to heaven
with its angels and its long gold harps
I'd stand a better chance, honey,
to book a stateroom in Noah's ark

There's just one thing makes me happy, baby
'Cause I led such a damnable life
Yes, there's only one thing keeps me smilin', baby,
though I led such a god-damned life
I don't have to see you no more--
here in hell you are the Devil's wife

 

 

DEAD

 

Now that I'm dead and it's time to figure out
how to dispose of my "remains," expect
no help from me! All my life I thought
of death so much I'm gladly giving up
my burial, here and now. Take this shovel!
You put your shoulder to the images
that gave me nightmares from the moment I saw
my first corpse at the tender age of thirteen,
though dead Jesus stared at me every day
from schoolroom walls as long as I can remember.
It wasn't easy doing arithmetic
with the dead God watching my pencil slip.
And that night, walking home in the dark
beside my mother, I carried the dead boy
from the funeral home right into my room.
I set him on my bed, where he lay all night
beneath my pin-up lamp of a ship's wheel.
Funeral home . . . that strange, that strangest phrase!
Home where the dead "live," accept "visitors"
they can't even see or hear-what a joke!
You even sign a book for them to keep,
a last memento of their graduation.
If my farewell appearance on this Earth's
to be an opening at a funeral home,
how about a cardboard sign on an easel
in the foyer that reads "Remains To Be Seen"
followed by a big black pointing arrow?
Do what you must to my dust, as long as
my vestigial atoms aren't polished up,
powdered and painted by the undertaker
into some utterly dreadful work of art
designed to inspire people I hardly knew
to gather drooling over my bier, crooning:
"Oh, he looks so good!" "Like he was alive!"
I'd prefer they stood glum-faced and muttered,
"Boy, don't Bill look dead?" "Dead as a mackerel."
And I'm not sure I'll even want a bier
when I'm gone, though on a sweaty summer day
I loved a cold one. Anyway, the word
"bier" always struck me as hilarious
in solemn newspaper accounts that read:
"Mourners filed before the bier," a perfect
description of depressed office workers
lining up at the bar on a Friday afternoon.
And "Lenin's bier"-what brand did he prefer?
Here I succumb to temptation, though
I guess my ego really doesn't exist,
to offer a riddle composed in my youth:
"What is the bier that no man can resist
but never drinks, though swallow it he must?"
Or maybe I stole that somewhere. All things
are possible to him who has no ego.
And without an ego, who needs . . . anything?
Maybe you're already deciding how
you'll divvy up my "effects"-another Word
of Death I loved a lot. My special effects!:
the noises I produced from my rear end
that she claimed disgusted her, then laughed so hard. . . .
The duck voice I perfected from grade four
that threw entire classrooms to the floor,
and never failed to amuse a cranky child,
myself included, which is why I mastered it.
J'ai quitté mes effets,
                                     mes beaux effets de neige!
That's my late friend, André Breton, who never
believed there was a Hereafter here-so he isn't here!
(That's the big thing nobody tells you until
the old guy with the flashlight hails you aboard
his leaky rowboat for the darkling ride. . . .)
And if you don't understand those lines of French-
Zut, alors!-the one effect I no doubt should
have acquired Up There being a little darkness,
un peu d'obscurité, like all the poets
who are truly great. But over here
in the Afterlife, I'm working up some dark.
Bet on it, okay? How about this stunt?:
I'm rubbing the ball with pitch, murky stuff,
mummy-spit, Egyptian hoodoo tango
jus d'orange to hurl at Wally Stevens,
that fatty, when he steps up to bat at
Saturday's game. Come to think of it, there's
a lot of poets down here, mostly dead,
but some of them still "alive" (or so they say)
where you are, in the air, the living air,
continuing to write their dreadful poems,
which is all ye need to know about how
moribund the world of poesy is
despite the hope that keeps us alive‚ almost. . . .
But let me restrain my corpse from clowning around
to salute that jigger of Irish blood
my grandmother insisted floats around in my veins
and more than one friend could testify
screamed now and again to be filled in my life!
Therefore crack open a bottle of anything
and set it, casually, on my coffin lid,
if I'm lucky enough to have one.
That container you'll have to shell out for.
You see, I wasn't kidding when I said
you shouldn't expect much help from me.
If I don't rate an ornate Egyptian barque,
my coffin ought to look like a canoe
for the dark journey across the darker river.
Once upon a time I stood on its shore,
after my father died. Karen the undertaker
led me down to the basement of the Home
where the Underworld begins for real,
with a dozen caskets mounted on its walls,
hanging like kitchen cabinets in a showroom.
Awed by the domesticity of death,
I picked the one that looked like the bronze hood
of the Ford he bought in 1951.
At fifteen, during a driving lesson
on vacation, visiting relatives
in Decatur, Georgia, I rammed it
through a telephone pole. My father's whiplash
never healed. At sixteen it became my car,
holy sanctuary of first sex.
Thus, that afternoon, when I pointed to
the sleek bronze job we buried him in,
I paid part of my debt. For he fixed cars,
you see, and would have loved the idea
of spending eternity tinkering
inside one. And that connects to a dream,
a horrible dream I made into a poem
a million years ago, in which I saw
the engine of a car as living flesh.
But wait a minute-time out! Stop right here.
Isn't this my death we're talking about?
Let me be greedy, let me have my death
To myself before anyone else claims it.
Despite what I said a while ago, I don't think
I want my decease left in your hands!
Let me hold it in the little bone home
of my hand to sniff the way I smelled my fingers
then the steering wheel the very first time
I was granted the incredible privilege
of putting them inside the right vagina, then
speeding home ecstatically late at night.
Fingers? What are they for? I used to know.
I used to make beautiful sounds come out
of a box by pressing ivory keys-
and now I'm in the box. This is the only
music I can make any more, these croaky
sounds from what's left of my voice-box. Like it?
No? What do I care. Only ego cares,
and ego wears thin, and then it snaps,
a worn piano hammer caught in wires,
the key that won't play any more, the first
note of the song called "Nevermore Any More"
that I just wrote with Edgar Allan Poe.
He's here too, but he stinks. You can't love death
the way he did and not stink. Right, Eddie?
Here in Death's Dream Kingdom, where the skies
are not cloudy all day, and Never is heard.
A discouraging word, "never," but only
when intoned by Mr. T. S. Eliot.
He stinks too, but not as much as the other
creeps in this joint, all awaiting parole
-or is this the parole? The two words
we've been waiting for forever: "Go back!"
Reader, the craft of the poem begins
to break up. I can feel it collapsing,
not in the ancient high heroic way,
but modernistically, splinter by splinter.
Our lofty room in the hold of heaven
or deep in the pit of hell has sprung a leak!
I am so depressed by coffin design,
which seems to lag behind the other arts,
though any great museum has its exhibits,
leaving me to wonder where the bodies went
from those pillaged sepulchres of Egypt,
Rome, Greece. A friend just back from Italy
told me that after twenty years they throw
your remnants in a common grave; the dirt
has been exhausted by so much death. They need
to freshen it with the newly dead. It was something
to behold, said my friend, and think about.
Perhaps the fire is best, though Jules and Jim's
cremation scene (and the World War newsreels
of the ovens seared into my young brain)
make burning the solution I like least.
Think of stinging your finger on a match,
then think of that match applied to your face. . . .
By then, though, feeling is gone, left behind
in words or the angry hearts of your children
who, growing up, often wanted to kill you,
and didn't, or did, so that's why you're here
in this fix, having just been squirted full
of blossomy formaldehyde. Did you know
they use it to preserve ice cream? They do.
So, in a sense, we are prepared for this
final dose from the very first spoon
of vanilla administered by mom.
Which makes her a kind of Doctor Jekyll
turning you into something you don't want
to be. Turning your hide into Mister
Hyde, until they hide you forever
in a formal tuxedo, a formal de
Hyde, if I can stretch the French a little,
relishing a last little poet's pun
before they close the lid, or before you
close this book in total disgust, muttering
that this junk surely isn't poetry.
But having read this far, whatever you think,
you're in here with me now. Ain't it cozy?
Maybe you would like some Amontillado?
There's a whole cask around here somewhere. . . .
No, there's no cable TV, no refrigerator,
and (sorry) you can't use your cell phone.
Here are a couple of old magazines you've read
before-Noweek, Unpeople, Eternity
("For Those in Love with the Products of Time").
The literary types will want to browse
The New York Review of Stiffs-for the dead
by the dead, or Impersonal Computer.
Read a mag until the doctor comes.
He's running a little late; he always does.
Why don't you move closer, take your look, run
your fingers through the ashes of my hair
or leave me all alone here in the dark