by Ben Lerner
IN THE COMMERCIAL she just stabs a straw into an orange and sucks. We tried that at home and lost massive amounts of blood. When I was little, she confessed, beginning to cry, we were forced to race in sacks, to race in pairs with our near legs bound. Coach was finally fired for rewarding each good hit with a sparkling article of porn. His slow-pitch team was sponsored by AA. His house was always already egged. It was when I tried to eat a straw through a straw that I learned my first important lesson about form.
WHEN WE FOUND EYES in the hospital Dumpster, we decided to build the most awesome snowman ever. The author addresses the reader; the clown, the kids at home. Angels are absences in the snow, visible only from above. When it thaws they will stand up and search for the children they have known.
THE ROSE has a minutely serrate margin, like a poem. There ends analogy. A dying process. At the border of the cornea and sclera, a momentary wavering. Excluded from beatific vision, but not condemned to further punishment. In the dream she told me she felt fine. Like dust. To what shall we liken analogy, if not to hypermetropia. These carpets are the color of migraine. Note to self: change your life. I assume the palmate antlers of hoofed mammals have so often been likened to candelabra I’m not even going to try. Boy, you got trouble in your head. Every time, he says, breasts are described in the poems of men, a woman undergoes mastectomy. I said he says to gain some credibility, which is a privileged form of distance. This one goes out to Grandma Elsie, short for Elsewhere, whom I never met. This one goes out to Grandma Rosie, who couldn’t remember her first cancer by the time she died of being ready. Her ashes are on a shelf in Cambridge. Awaiting scattering. Note to self: don’t publish this. Besides the half-dead and their families, everybody in the home was from the Indies. Carpets the color of. We administered music and morphine. For ninety-four years, she had performed her gender admirably. Anyway, this isn’t a time or a place. But the day she died some punk nearly hit me with his bike, parked it, and got all in my face. Boy, you got trouble in your head. I started to cry. Like a woman, he said. As if to give me strength.
WE BEG THE QUESTION that gives the lie. Which swallows the usage. Half of the panel supports the sentence: Without emotion. We pursue a color of maximum lightness. Town crier become town drunk. A diet of bacon and meth. Prolonged speech making to delay the action. Of the hammer. Convicted on the strength of his indifference to conviction. The music is inadmissible. The gavel fell on a percussion cap and now we’re holding candles, singing, My God, My God, show me what you’re working with.
RAPIDLY REPEATED STIMULI have locked our jaws and fixed our gazes upward. Public launches are designed to trick the body into an attitude of prayer. Despair is an oculogyric crisis, as every politician knows, and can be treated with displays of strength in the upper air. Perhaps scratching out one’s eyes is all that remains of bearing witness, but note the hegemony of the image among the blind. The way our national uncle stares from the poster, claiming to want every passerby. Nunc dimittis servum tuum, you murderers. I come from a long line of prematurely balding communards who would prefer not to. Keep your infernal, infertile high ground, with its toll roads of crushed glass.
A GREAT BOOK must be frozen and fractured along its faults in order to lay bare internal structure. Anna Karenina touches the paperknife to her cheek. When a child dies in a novel, he enters the world. And writes the novel. The calories in a great book equal those burned in its reading. Or its burning. Even if there are no great books, argues Levin, we must act as if there were. For the sake of the peasants who work the paper. A gentleman may fight duels only with other gentlemen. A reader may not demand satisfaction.
A BRIEF, COLLECTIVE SHUDDER and the desire passed into its opposite. The public shared a cigarette. Now to choose between loving our offspring and loving offspring in general, between veiling the reference and taking the vow. The right to have it both ways is inalienable or it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways. A contradiction shifting planes produces lightning. Or a reflection of distant lightning in the clouds.
THE MAN OBSERVES THE ACTION ON THE FIELD with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him.
EQUIPPED WITH FLUFFY PLUMAGE that allows for almost noiseless flight. Our bombs are dropped from such altitudes our wars have ended by the time they reach their targets. Like that sentence. No, like any sentence. Maintaining the blood supply to the brain during rapid vertical acceleration requires subtle reasoning, soft music. Hence an earphone in the helmet. What goes up, must come down, pleads the child of the astronaut. Not if you go way, way up.
A SURGERY TO ABRIDGE the body. A reader-friendly body presented to the public. The public depends from a well-regulated militia. Our army, too, has its required reading. A soldier must read Tolstoy’s War (abr.), Dostoyevsky’s Crime (abr.). Even in death, the old debate between depth and surface: some poets attach weights to their ankles, others just float facedown. What is the value of reading? Depends. What is it keeping you from doing?
AN INFINITE PROGRESSION OF FINAL FRONTIERS designed to distract the public from its chest wound. We will not just sit here being mooned, insists the president. Your kids are arranging a day of national mourning with a trunk full of tequila and pipe bombs. In despair, the painter returns to the figure. Or has the world grown abstract? In my experience, the eyeball hardens. In my opinion, the sound of weeping. Maybe the microphone itself is speaking. On the count of three, everyone everywhere concede everything.
THE INHERENT DIFFICULTY OF THE GAME rests exclusively in the obscurity of its object. Points are taken away for killing civilians, but points are irrelevant. Gold earns you extra men. Children, if questioned, deny the mediation of the joystick or fail to hear the question. Often we are permitted to return to levels we’ve surpassed to search for mushrooms.
THE TIME-RELEASE SEDATIVE is advertised by means of accelerated photographic frames. The music fails to produce conscious awareness but evokes a violent response. As an artist I’m interested in filling things with blood, especially clocks, but as a mom I demand the illusion of continuous motion. Best viewed through radial slits in a drum. Best viewed before 1987. A flickering series of stills induced by a stroke in turn induces a stroke, restoring the illusion of continuous perceptual flow. My colleagues, what have we learned? That consciousness has a neural correlate in snow. That movement is painted on.
SHE HAS TAPED AN AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH of our neighborhood to the ceiling. She looks up to see our house from above while we’re in bed. This is but one example of her uncontrollable desire to look down on the structures that she’s in.
AMERICANS HAVE CONQUERED THEIR FEAR of public speaking by abolishing the public. Chief among our exports: wisps of precipitation. Because it receives the impression of your teeth, it is genuine emotion. Compare the streak left on the gemstone with that left on the retina. Confusing the desire to display affection with affection, we applaud the veterans of an imaginary conflict with real victims. An immoderate reverence for tradition guides everything but our reading. I throw my own party and go away.
THE SOLDIER IN THE FILM asks the audience to describe his wounds. Unaware his legs are elsewhere, he attempts to walk out of the screen. What matters is the form, not the content, of the airdrop, how it alludes to manna. Then kill me, he begs. Active soldiers act like actors, inactive actors act like soldiers, audience members vomit in their giant sodas. Dance, I say, aiming near his feet. Think, I say, aiming near his head. The crowd dismembers. Now I’m on my back, making an angel, awaiting not the peanut butter and propaganda, but the flowering apparatus that retards its fall.
SPUN DOWN FROM AND REELED UP TO the hand by a flick of the wrist. In what sense is it a toy, she asks, if it catches rea
l fish? Like soldiers carrying popguns and switchblade combs. At first, the elephant could fly only when he held a feather in his trunk. Would you rather live during the ascension of a civilization, asks the top-hatted cricket, or during its decline? Pygmalion or Pinocchio? Then he learned to hold it in his mind. Not every off-screen voice is the voice of God. But we must act as if it were. For the sake of the rabbit who has run out of landscape and plugged the shotgun with his finger. Do rabbits have fingers? I don’t know, do chickens? The hunted confounds the hunter with a sudden change of gender.
THE TONE DOES TERRIBLE THINGS to the landscape. Its flatness drapes the landscape in unspeakable light, unspeakable space. The public, delicately inflamed, attempts to change the channel. But a channel cannot be changed by force. During the course of festive occasions, ash rains down. Bits of parti-colored ash inform us that our tone is festive. Perhaps change must come from within a channel, suggests Levin, from within a landscape draped with depth?
DEAR CYRUS, HE PUTS DOWN, DEAR REPETITION, while you were driving home from, how shall I put this, Mexico, driving dark pales into the panic grass, the kids got into the Roman candles, the ginger vodka, the Bible I gave your daughter was hollow, contained a, how shall I, pistol, two kinds of people in this world, do I smell incense, swimmers and nonswimmers, a child with puppy dog eyes asks if puppies go to heaven, the pistol proves untrainable, ruins the carpet, a no or no question, I guess I just assumed dogs dog-paddled, Dear, Dear, he puts down, Dear Me, when a dog drowns an angel gets its wings, and a long proboscis for sucking blood, no self-putdowns, she screamed, I pretended it was alive so I could pretend to put it to sleep, how shall I, sweetheart, no doggy heaven, put this, without a doggy hell.
HOLD ME, says the microphone. The dialogue inside my body is breaking down. The doctor insists on changing the tense, but the gesture is lost on me, stranded on the skin. When did I ever say that I could teach you how to live, demands the canvas. Light wishes only to be a history of its transfers, wishes only to be land. They have pricked my back with a series of suspected allergens, an allegory of reading, but my skin is notoriously indifferent. To print media. To the dialogue of fear and pity designed to restore the public’s settings. You have a swelled head, complain my hands.
THE SUN SETS IN A WEAK SENSE, striking conjunctions of rock from the view, imparting a vivid red to the red to the red—the text is skipping. The author dreams of cutting an adjective and tucking it behind the reader’s ear like a flower. And cutting like a flower and tucking it behind the reader’s ear like a flower.
BORN NOSTALGIC, THE ARTIST PROPOSES a return to despair. He installs himself in your freezer. The critic argues it is not real hair, that real hair could never do this. At what point, asks the critic, did you realize the blood was fake? About halfway through the transfusion, when he began to talk a bunch of bullshit. About the formal capacity for choice? Yes, how did you know? I worked as an artist during the war.
THE AIRCRAFT ROTATES about its longitudinal axis, shifting the equinoxes slowly west. Our system of measure is anchored by the apparent daily motion of stars that no longer exist. When the reader comes to, the writer hits him again. Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. This is not your captain speaking, thinks the captain. A magnetic field reversal turns our fire friendly. Fleeing populations leave their bread unleavened, their lines unbroken.
WHEN WE SAW THE PATTERN, we took the kids out of school. Broke out the special water. Two churches linked by a sudden alley through the corn. As the Hopi myth foretells. A massive loss of technology. A spider leaves a string between two points. Think about it. From the duster it appears a thing of glory. Makes you reconsider the whole idea of property. Stems inside formations have blown nodes. Explain that, Mr. TV. Part of the confusion involves words. We wake up with mud on our feet. The other part is just the way we are. Scared of the new when it’s thousands of years old. If you have never seen a sleeping toddler crawl beyond the lip of porch light, zip it. If my meaning is clear, it’s already too late. For God’s sake people. Open your hearts.
V
TWENTY-ONE GUN SALUTE FOR RONALD REAGAN
V
I am wearing a Mikhail Gorbachev Halloween mask.
Blood is a vegetable when it forms part of a school lunch.
Tell the boys to go out there and win one for me.
The former president entered my room at night.
We celebrated by breaking off pieces of the wall.
I want the tone to have a very broad surface in relation to its depth.
I want a gun for protection.
I want the form to enact the numbing it describes.
I would shoot myself only in self-defense.
Pornography considered as a weapon system and v.v.
An accurate Civil War reenactment should include reinstating the draft.
The stigma attached to a diplomatically communicated disease.
It’s important to talk to your readers about drugs.
The nipple is just visible under the anchorwoman’s blouse.
This is your tax dollars hard at work.
I have deleted many beautiful lines.
A highly accurate weapon housed in a silo.
I can’t stop crying.
I was drunk the night of the accident.
All the other painters were like, Why didn’t I think of that?
I have agreed not to defend Poland from the east.
I have agreed not to defend Poland from the East.
Mom says we can keep it if we feed it.
Nightlights go out all over America.
Brutus is urging his comrades to seize a fleeting opportunity.
We salivate at the sound of the bell.
That part of the concept corresponding to the wrist
is slit, emitting music.
There go the conventions Dad gave his life to protect.
The Soviet director argued convincingly against the use of sound.
Characterized by alternating rigidity and extreme flexibility.
The president’s legacy is speaking slowly.
An epistemology borrowed from game shows.
Love is made to highly realistic dolls.
The passivity of dolphins has been wildly exaggerated.
Abortion is murder.
A child could have painted that.
We dipped cicadas in WD-40 and ignited them with punks.
Magnetic resonance imaging reveals a degenerate hemisphere.
A diamond cheval-de-frise tops the White House.
The floral arrangement is based on outmoded ideology.
I am unmatched in my portrayal of subtle human emotions.
Workers report cracks in our mode.
There is no beauty like the beauty of a throwaway line
the split second before it’s thrown.
We carried home the reader shoulder high.
I neither regret nor recall my presidency.
Carefully equilibrated parts designed to move in the breath.
It can easily be converted into a fully automatic.
Mikey likes it.
I prefer apostasy from the top down to belief from the bottom up.
You must cross four bases in a diamond pattern in order to score.
The bang caused by the shockwave
preceding an aircraft traveling at the speed of sound
is my middle name.
I am attempting to stress the absence of hope while implying resignation.
A trademark used in a figurative context and in lowercase.
Minute hooks fasten to a corresponding strip with a surface of uncut pile.
A moment of unprecedented clarity experienced as a loss.
The starlings nesting in the bell’s flared opening
did not hear the toll that slew them.
This is a masterpiece on a very grand scale.
I have drastically relaxed the standards of sexual behavior.
The pathos is visib
le when you hold the poem to the light.
She comes twice a month, in the first and third quarters of the moon.
The Soviets have prevailed.
I am beloved for my hoarse voice, ample nose, and timeworn hat.
The silvery leaves change position at nightfall.
What if we start over underground?
I propose truth is reached by a continuing dialectic.
I disagree.
Your life isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
My practical designs include a 1934 Sears refrigerator
and the interiors of NASA spacecraft.
Infinite Mind; Spirit; Soul; Principle; Life; Truth; Love.
An ideal cage bird given the pronounced affection among mates.
I am fond of lightning without audible thunder.
Reach out and touch someone.
Even the most conservative among us have lost all faith
in the possibility of evoking a common cultural framework.
Nobody moves
and nobody gets hurt.
The stoatlike creature symbolizes guilt.
The meanings detonate at preset depths.
I have never felt like a real man.