Marvin Bell is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including Mars Being Red and Vertigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). His poems and essays have appeared in hundreds of anthologies, and among his many honors is the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Retired from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Bell was Iowa’s first Poet Laureate and now teaches for the brief-residency MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon. He is the creator of a poetic form known as the “dead man poem.”

The Book of the Dead Man (Camouflage)

by Marvin Bell
Live as if you were already dead.
                                   —Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and Camouflage

When the dead man wears his camouflage suit, he hides in plain sight.
The dead man, in plain sight, disrupts the scene but cannot be seen.
His chocolate-chip-cookie shirt mimics the leaves in a breeze.
His frog-skin dress, his bumpy earth nature, leave us lost and alone,

People on couch
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