From “The Book of the Dead Man (#1) by Marvin Bell

To the dead man, guilt and fear are indistinguishable.
The dead man cannot make out the spider at the center of its web.
He cannot see the eyelets in his shoes and so he wears them unlaced.
He reads the large type and skips the fine print.
His vision surrounds a single tree, lost as he is in a forest.

Marvin Bell (1937-2020) was an American poet and critic whose family had immigrated from the Ukraine. He published his debut collection, Things We Dreamt We Died For, in 1966, and Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems in 2019.