WITH DANCES OF THE SKULL WE ANIMATE THE DEAD.

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With dances of the skull we animate the dead. We
put on the bodies of the dead. It’s important that we
can make the living out of the dead. How else would
we interact? If the dead are not breathing and desiring
and talking and whispering and garnering and grasping
and untying knots, how else would we know we’re
connected? I would like to connect with the concrete
like Petra Kuppers instructs. I would like to pet an
animal that doesn’t have a face and think it is living. I
see my hair tie and ask if there is a mouth I can watch
while it speaks, though I’ve never been able to read lips.
How would I know which of the dead would like to
speak to me if I am not the one to initiate? And what is
it about grandmothers that make them the first or
second to be called up from their rest? What if this
grandmother I never really knew, though she may have
been conscious enough to know me in the three weeks
we shared the earth as the living, is the grandmother
that could use the most rest? I shouldn’t write to her
about what her daughters say about her. Though she
already knows. It’s still not a kindness to repeat,
remind, mortar and pestle the ways she failed her
children and herself in her life. What would you expect
from a woman who may never have fully slept through
a night? What would you expect from a woman who
urges her granddaughter through the radio of the dead
not to have children. Or, if I must, to wait a very long
time. And if I must, to require someone else to do the
bulk of the people-making.

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