The Dummy’s Logbook
I
I have known of a silence
of which no one has spoken--
a solitude carved from the guts
of a tree and upstaged by
my bowed shadow, being
folded into less of myself.
I am dusk squared, forever
talked out my casket on a dare--
my own tongue cobbled out
of a wood block, only granted
its own language when tugged by
a string, opts again to be spot-lit,
and I’m awarded a century to yawn
and draw in the smoke of my creation
till I’m finally fit, called upon, to tell you
just how lacking my nights have been
Dummy's Logbook Act 1
II
If it’s October, it’s the Catskills—
that Lowest of Bar with its backdrop
of lake lit by a cabbage-colored glow
and its seats worriedly teased into clouds,
its salesmen, unpacking everything
out their case besides hit singles, sun,
and its comics making do with that wisecrack
about billiard balls and woodpeckers,
your own mouthpiece thrown so far
south, it’s now I who play host, who
lap ghosts back to life as if strangely cast--
this second act less reassuring than the first
soft sold as if it was golden voiced,
willed up from the dregs of a glass
or hard-boiled like eggs filling a void--
post-has-beens long past-having-any-of-it.
Dummy's Logbook Act II
III
Even cued by a dunce-card,
given pause by the audience,
imagine one’s body no longer game--
resigned to its own plush interior,
kindling so cross with itself, it’s become
this sensation less radiance than singe.
Who watches your back, fills you in
on the ash on your forehead, the dash
where your own dreams were meant to be,
reaching after a word like a hand at your throat?
Worse, I feel stitches where my sex should be,
where my limbs had flopped for a spell--
listening for proof that I am self-ruled,
seamlessly taking measure of my feats--
rather than volunteering to be fool-pimped,
this simple knot well below solving.
Dummy's Logbook Act III
IV
And if it’s April, it’s Vegas--
the tinkling prophesies of the slots,
the high kick of the dancers reminding
me of my own makeshift entrance.
You’ve craft-timed more memories,
thrown me one final punchline to straight-
man what I’d hoped was a heartbeat.
This was not how I drew it up.
My eyes ex-ed out, my lips spelled
by one O after another O(!)
how my ears fear that this opening
will be the last of what passes for the trope
in which I will be die-tossed, side-noted
like that chump who finds himself
in a hole, seemingly at peace, but still if
not inclined to return at least speak ill of it
Dummy's Logbook Act IV
Pat Keck graduated from The Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in sculpture in
1978. Since then, she has been carving and assembling painted wooden figures in her
family home. She was a founding member of the World Sculpture Racing Society and
winner of the World's First Sculpture Race, Cambridge MA. In 2003, she had a mid-
career retrospective “Puppets, Ghosts and Zombies” at the DeCordova Museum in
Lincoln MA (where Mark DeCarteret was first wowed by her work). She has collaborated
with the theater company Molasses Tank Productions in “Acts of Futility,” a staging of six
one act plays by Samuel Beckett that drew on imagery from her work and more
recently with film maker Peter Antony on the short film, “Night and Day.” She is
represented by the Pucker Gallery in Boston MA.
And Mark DeCarteret graduated from Emerson College with a BFA in Creative Writing in
1990. Since then, he has been published in a what’s what of literary reviews, including
AGNI, Boston Review, Caliban, Fence, Plume Poetry Journal, and the anthologies
American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Thus Spake the Corpse:
An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press) and Under the Legislature
of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press), which he also co-edited. Mark
is a co-founder of the City Hall Workshop. And was selected as Poet Laureate of
Portsmouth NH in 2009, dreaming up a Postcard Project that inspired 67 poets and 132
artists to team up. His collaboration with Pat Keck continued afterwards with “The
Dummy’s Logbook.”