by Ben Lerner
and affected spiritual gloom
with a turbulent cross-layering of brushwork.
Then, with the invention of the camera, we began to cry.
Here a woman emerges from the surface plane, invites our gaze,
and disappears. Here a woman succumbs
to her own frenetic coloration. The pictorial attack
on closed systems is a closed system.
Found matter invades the middle distance.
§
When a longing exceeds its object, a suburb is founded.
Goatsuckers spar in the linden. The redskins are hunted.
When the hunt exceeds its object, the past achieves
pubescence. History pauses
for emphasis. After these poems are published,
money will be no object.
Money will be a gray bird known for mocking other birds.
The stars will be adjusted for inflation
so that the dead can continue living
in the manner to which they’ve grown accustomed.
When a dream of convenience begins to dream itself,
the neighborhood’s last bamboos reel in their roots.
The children make love “execution style,”
then hold each other like moments of silence.
§
Your child lacks a credible god-term, a jargon of ultimacy.
He fails to distinguish between illusion (Schein) and beautiful illusion (schöner Schein).
He is inept and unattractive.
Today I asked your child to depress
the right pedal, to stop the action of the dampers
so that the strings could vibrate freely. In response he struck me
in the stomach with a pipe.
Your child is a bereavement arbitrarily prescribed,
a hyperkinetic disorder expressed in chromatic variations.
By the age of twenty-three, your child will be bald
and dead. He’s a bright boy and eager to learn. But bourgeois spectator forms
have supplanted the music of the salon,
inciting a sheer vertical sonority
that has dispatched the theme to keys beyond his reach.
§
Resembling a mobile but having no mobile parts,
my instrument for measuring potential differences (in volts)
is like a songbird in a Persian poem. I have absolutely no
idea what I’m saying. I know only
that I have a certain sympathy
for the rhetoric of risk and mystery. Think of my body
as a local institution. Think of my body
as a monocoque. Think of my body
as the ponderous surgeons of Wichita
ready their nibs. When the first starlings began to cough up blood,
the night applied its cataplasm. The moon issued its scrip
to the Austrian dead. An expert described your son
as incapable of some really important shit.
Your son described his name in the air with a spliff.
§
They can take your life, but not your life signs, my father
was fond of saying after apnea. But that was before articles
shifted during flight, before our graphs
grew indistinguishable from our appetites. In fine,
that was the greatest period of American prosperity
since my depression. Father’s left hand was an extension
of liberal thinking. It could strike a man without assuming
a position on the good. His left hand was a complete
and austere institution. In fine, it could move through
my body’s DMZs without detection. But that was before
articles copped pleas and feels from objects, objects
rendered fulgent by our theories, back before my mood
swung slowly open
to let this ether enter like a view.
§
The poetic establishment has co-opted contradiction.
And the poetic establishment has not co-opted contradiction.
Are these poems just cumbersome
or are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?
The sky stops painting and turns to criticism.
We envy the sky its contradictions. We envy the sky
its exposed patches of unprimed canvas
and their implicit critique of painterly finish.
It is raining for emphasis. Or it is raining emphases
on a public ill-prepared for the cubist accomplishment.
Perhaps what remains of innovation
is a conservatism at peace with contradiction,
as the sky transgresses its frame
but obeys the museum.
§
“Gather your marginals, Mr. Specific. The end
is nigh. Your vanguard of vanishing points has vanished
in the critical night. We have encountered a theory
of plumage with plumage. We have decentered our ties. You must quit
these Spenglerian Suites, this roomy room, this gloomy Why.
Never again will your elephants shit in the embassy.
Never again will you cruise through Topeka in your sporty two-door coffin.
In memoriam, we will leave the laws you’ve broken broken.”
On vision and modernity in the twentieth century, my mother wrote
“Help me.” On the history of structuralism my father wrote
“Settle down.” On the American Midwest from 1979 to the present, I wrote
“Gather your marginals, Mr. Specific. The end is nigh.”
I wish all difficult poems were profound.
Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound.
§
for Benjam in
Sensation dissolves into sense through this idle discussion,
into a sense that sees itself and is afraid. Still, we must finish our coffee
and partition epiphany
into its formative mistakes. Reclining on my detention-camp pallet,
I dream in Hebrew of a cigarette
that restores immediacy to the theoretical domain.
Or, if that strikes you as immodest, I purchase a portable classic
and interpret it loosely
until the infinite takes place. Recent criticism understates
the importance of our coffee,
how it removes transcendence from beneath our pillows
and leaves us a pointless enigma or silver dollar in its stead.
The stars are a mnemonic without object.
Let the forgetting begin.
§
for Benjam in
The forgetting begins.
Infinitives are hewn from events.
The letters of your name fall asleep at their posts.
The dead vote in new members. Police declaw your books.
A suspicious white powder is mailed to the past,
forcing its closure. In order to avoid exposure,
I use the present tense. Sense grows sentimental
at the prospect of deferral. The stars dehisce.
By “stars” I mean, of course, tradition,
and by “tradition” I mean nothing at all.
A pronoun disembowels his antecedent.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Your body is broken by exegesis.
The thinkable goes sobbing door-to-door.
§
for Benjam in
The thinkable goes sobbing door-to-door
in search of predicates accessible by foot.
But sense is much shorter in person
and retreats from chamber to antechamber to text.
How then to structure a premise like a promise?
The heroic negativity of pleasure
is that it makes my body painfully apparent,
a body that weighs six hundred pounds on Jupiter
and next
to nothing here in Europe.
How then to justify our margins?
Some cultures use quotation marks for warmth.
In ours they’ve withered without falling off.
The trees apologize each autumn,
but nature can never be sorry enough.
§
What, if not the derivative, will keep us warm? The tragic interchangeability of nouns?
The breastbone? Two vanguards sharing a bathroom?
When I first found the subjunctive, she was broke and butt-naked.
Now she wants half. She wants her own set of keys
and bullets designed to expand on impact.
A pamphlet of sparks? The National Book Award?
Meaning is a child of my third marriage. A marriage of convenience.
A wartime marriage. We had plastic champagne flutes and no champagne.
A staple instead of a ring. A dialectician in place of a priest.
A butter substitute? Rogaine for women?
Consider the rain my resignation. I regret having founded Cubism.
I regret the lines I broke by the eye
and the lines I broke by the breath.
The hair around the vulva? Proust in translation? September 11th?
§
Announcing a late style as distinctive as the late style of Matisse,
my grandfather no longer speaks.
The figure in my grandfather’s memory has disappeared completely.
It has been replaced with a kind of allover abstraction
made up of broad and colorful strokes. Critics agree
that my grandfather’s exaggerated midsection and useless legs
constitute a critique of consumer society,
that his body’s adoption of chance procedures
signals a rejection of his former realist sympathies.
“The progressive surrender of the resistance of the medium
and the exclusion of all techniques extraneous to the medium”
is one way to conceive of artistic modernity:
critics identify the essence of painting with flatness;
sculpture, they argue, rests in peace.
§
Now to defend a bit of structure: beeline, skyline, dateline, saline—
now to torch your effluent shanty
so the small rain down can rain. I’m so Eastern that my Ph.D.
has edible tubers, my heart a hibachi oiled with rapeseed. I’m so Western that my Ph.D.
can bang and bank all ball game, bringing the crowd to its feet
and the critics to their knees. Politically speaking, I’m kind of an animal.
I feed the ducks duck meat in duck sauce when I walk to clown school in my clown shoes.
The Germans call me Ludwig, bearer of estrus, the northern kingdom’s
professional apologist. The Germans call me Benji, the radical browser,
alcoholic groundskeeper of the Providence Little League. All readers of poetry
are Germans, are virgins. All readers of poetry sicken me. You, with your Soviet Ph.D.
and Afghan tiepin. You with your penis stuck in a bottle. And yes, of course, I sicken me,
with my endless and obvious examples
of the profound cultural mediocrity of the American bourgeoisie.
§
Beauty cannot account for how the sparkplug works.
But if the sparkplug doesn’t work, it is more beautiful.
If I display a sparkplug, it is sculpture.
A sparkplug sculpture may be a real sparkplug,
but the sculpture refers to other sculptures, while the sparkplug refers
to an engine cylinder.
The word “sparkplug” is an altogether different matter.
Thus I return to the subject of the museum.
A woman is crying in the Surrealist wing.
Beauty cannot account for why the woman is crying.
But because the woman is crying, she is more beautiful.
Is the woman therefore a work of Surrealist sculpture?
A sculpture of a woman may be a real woman,
but the sculpture refers to other sculptures, while the woman refers
§
You say “ablution,” I say “ablation.”
You say “gloaming,” I say “crepuscule.”
You say “organ of copulation,” I say “organ of excretion.”
You say “forget-me-not,” I say “scorpion grass.”
While you were at tennis camp, I was finger-banged
by a six-fingered man. I replaced your dead goldfish
with another dead goldfish. I put your dad in a headlock
and your mom in a home. I ate your juicy motherfucking plums.
Irreconcilable differences: you disliked the Richter show.
Your gait is characterized by an exaggerated flexion of the knee.
I really don’t want to do this over the phone.
But I also never want to see you again.
So I paid Ben Lerner to write you this poem
in language that was easy to understand.
§
To attend carefully to Celan in the airport terminal.
To admire the aspen in the atrium. This adjective
for that anguish. The unnatural attitudes
of the sleeping tourist. Remember
the ’80s? We hit rewind
and the snow refused the ground.
We were all of us speaking German,
we were all of us wearing licensed sport apparel.
Some took your absence in stride. Some took it
lying down. Some took it with milk
and sugar. Only your wife took it like a man.
My flight originated in Denver.
My flight is now boarding. My flight is now slowly
pushing away from the gate.
§
To assimilate sculpture to sepulture, sublimity to sublation,
to ululate sub judice, to inurn in utero,
as if the absence of birds in the poem were the absence of birds in the world,
as if et cetera were an aesthetics. Ad interim,
shadows cast shadows ad infinitum. Ad absurdum,
eye-contact counts as coitus, neologism as parturition.
To squander the mind’s ultimate candela on the mimetic.
To simply hurl paint at the canvas
as if it were a blackbody absorbing incident radiants,
as if in vino veritas quod erat demonstrandum nonsense as death wish,
nonsense as warm-blooded egg-laying winged and feathered vertebrate.
Now with handicap access to the principal texts,
principal texts posthumously signed.
Now with expanded signature in bilingual remission.
§
The left hand is a scandal. And my woman is left-handed.
She neglects our middle children.
She deploys her powers on behalf of other nations.
Sleep is a synagogue. And my woman sleeps
the dreamless sleep of the pornographer. Mother always said,
“Worship me, and all this will be yours.” Father always said,
“Suffer common hardship and die in bed.”
Yet I reside with my woman on her acre of irony.
Yet I will die on the cross and I worship my death.
The Internet is the future. And my woman rejects the Internet.
She rises up when I lie down.
She inflames divisions among the Jews.
Citation is exaltation. And my woman cites
her own unpublished dissertation.
§
I posit the notion of progress so I can experience decline.
I sport my underwear on the outside of my trousers.
My hybrid form has become a genre in its own right.
I squander my disposable income on redundant social services.
After the dissolution of feudal society, moonl
ight emerges
as the symbolic locus of heroic individualism.
I transform absurd contingency into historical necessity with box wine.
My facility with parataxis makes me respected, feared.
I send my professor thirty dollars’ worth of fusiform compound umbels
after her only child is shot and killed. Interwar experiments with collage
reflect increasing disenchantment with the sensible world.
A wasp attacks me using her ovipositor as a sting.
I strike a teenager with a baseball bat to gain blue-collar credibility.
I feel dirty reading on the toilet.
§
I place a terminal raceme of fragrant, funnel-shaped perianths
beside the mile marker where Orlando flipped his Honda.
I fuck his girlfriend and induce epistaxis in his homeboy.