by Alex Lemon
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Trembling
Chapter 1
MRI
The Best Part
After
Two for My Tumor
Scaffolding
Last Body
DNA
Goodbye Song
Swallowing the Scalpel
Chapter 2
Love Is a Very Small Tsunami
Plum
Fantastic Goes the Lost Cause
The Pleasure Notebook
Juke Joint
A Country Mile of Soft
Happiness
Step Up
Graffiti
Desideratum
The Portrait My Mother Painted from My Mug Shot
Mosquito
Chapter 3
Other Good
Slake
Fuck You Lazy God
Mugging
Little Handcuffs of Air
Kinematics
Rivets
Ashtray
Silt
Having Been Roused by the Sound of a Garbage Truck from a Moment of Unwaking in ...
The Butcher Dreams
Arpeggio
Snow
Who Finds You
Chapter 4
Corpus
Callnote
Fever
That First Day of Spring Kind of Feeling
Look Close
Cocoon
The Xylophone Is Blaze
Preface to Augury
Sophisticated
Below the Nearer Sky
Happy Fun Sex Movie
Tumult
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Thanks to the editors of the following publications, where some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:
AGNI: “Mosquito”; AGNI Online 2006: “Kinematics”; Alaska Quarterly Review: “Last Body”; Another Chicago Magazine: “Tumult” and “Two for My Tumor”; Artful Dodge: “DNA,” “Other Good,” “Preface to Augury,” and “Swallowing the Scalpel”; Black Warrior Review: “Love is a Very Small Tsunami”; The Bloomsbury Review: “The Portrait My Mother Painted from My Mug Shot”; Blue Collar Review: “The Butcher Dreams”; Butcher Shop: “Fever” and “Graffiti”; Cimarron Review: “MRI” and “The Pleasure Notebook”; CutBank: “The Best Part”; Denver Quarterly: “Who Finds You”; Florida Review: “Rivets”; Gulf Coast: “Scaffolding”; Hayden’s Ferry Review: “Happy Fun Sex Movie”; Indiana Review: “That First Day of Spring Kind of Feeling”; Jabberwock Review: “Plum”; The Journal: “Sophisticated”; Konundrum Engine Literary Review: “Goodbye Song”; The Literary Review: “Callnote”; Naranjas y Nopales: “After”; New England Review: “Having Been Roused . . .”; New Orleans Review: “Corpus”; Octopus: “A Country Mile of Soft” and “The Xylophone is Blaze”; Pleiades: “Cocoon,” “Juke Joint,” “Snow,” and “Step Up”; Post Road: “Below the Nearer Sky” and “Silt”; Salt Hill: “Fantastic Goes the Lost Cause”; Sonora Review: “Happiness”; Swink: “Ashtray”; Tin House: “Look Close”; Typo: “Mugging”; Washington Square: “Trembling”
For Ma
INTRODUCTION
“Physical pain,” Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain, her brilliant examination of the intersection of suffering, language, and power, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”
How does pain erase speech? First, of course, because the one doing the hurting is too englobed in the experience of hurt to make any words: hit your thumb with a hammer and it’s as if the bone-deep intensity of that experience hijacks all energy from the mind; nothing can be seen or felt but the throbbing, blinding “this-ness” of that experience. As if there were nothing in the world but ache.
Throbbing, blinding, ache: the relative paucity of the words themselves point to the second reason why pain eludes the saying. We don’t have the vocabulary for it. English, which has an endless supply of terms for, say, getting drunk, offers the barest scraps to help us name the way we’re ailing. Pain can be throbbing, stabbing, shooting, piercing, or burning, and that’s about it. Is this because intoxication is primarily a social experience, whereas pain is the opposite, always experienced alone? Words exist for the realm of the shared. Our poverty of terms for pain may indicate that we’ve given up on creating a lexicon, understanding that the solitary, suffering subject remains a solitary. When we are wordless, we tend to be world-less as well. What cannot be conveyed about the self and the body lodges stubbornly in either silence or “sounds and cries.”
But poetry is unlike other language, and its difference from daily speech lies in part in its relationship to those wordless utterances. Poetry bases itself in the sheer expressive power of vowel and consonant; rhythmic, bodily sound-making; moan and exhalation; the outcry that shades into song. Stanley Kunitz says that his poems begin in sound, and “sense has to fight its way in.” The music that lies beneath speech is a vehicle of feeling.
Perhaps it’s this grounding in the physicality of language that gives poetry its courage to wrestle with the difficult, if not downright impossible, work of getting the barely sayable onto the page. Poetry’s power exists in exact proportion to this attempt; the harder it tries to do what can’t be done, the more beautiful and engaging its failure. Or perhaps better to say that its failure—the inability of words to be commensurate with the power of experience—begins to come out the other side, and somehow or other, through some feat of linguistic legerdemain, a poem is made that does what speech shouldn’t be able to do. A miraculous poem approximates the character of subjectivity, how it is to be in the world.
Alex Lemon’s “Other Good” seems to me a miraculous poem, one that locates a vocabulary for a near-unspeakable realm of experience. Here is its opening passage:Anesthesia dumb, scalpel-paste
Rawing my tongue, I found
Myself star-fished in sky
Spinning days. I stared into my eyelids’
Bustling magic, the black
Of my hands. Oh, how darkness
Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs
& the choke of the sea. This is my everything—
Bright shuddered my cheeks,
Shadows whistled through their teeth,
Hallways thrummed & snorted,
The surgeons in my brain
Pissed with no hands.
The poem’s first and considerable accomplishment is to defamiliarize the hospital world: no familiar furniture here, no IV bottles and cranked-up beds with white-white sheets. Lemon’s unexpected image-world immediately evokes the speaker’s disorientation and ravishment, and the reader is swiftly destabilized and placed into a linguistic territory that is the result, at least metaphorically, of that “rawing” of the tongue; it isn’t possible to speak in “cooked,” orderly terms here, not when you’re “starfished in sky / Spinning days.”
The poem continues:Each day nurses wore their best
Tinfoil skirts, buried
Their caresses in my side
While pillows whispered
In spite of your scars you are tickled
To death of life.
I couldn’t understand this
Always being held. Lung-machines
Sang louder. Wave song & useless.
Midnights & swearing. Blue.
It’s a wonderful, unexpected turn, what those pillows have to say; this is no moment when we’d expect to meet an affirmation. But the flesh wants to live: the body’s greatest imperative is to continue. That line and stanza break after “I couldn’t understand this” is cunningly pl
aced; it makes us read the line as a part of the sentence before and of the sentence below. In other words, I couldn’t understand why I’d be happy to live, and I couldn’t understand this “always being held,” the caresses, the engines and practices of care bearing the speaker through difficulty.
It’s telling, too, how syntax breaks apart here, sentences growing shorter and shorter as the forceful verbs that are part of this poet’s signature fall away. Now we’re floating in a state where time (and its vehicle, the sentence) has been atomized. “Wave song & useless. / Midnights & swearing. Blue.” In the depth of the body’s night, we’re suspended in mere fragments of speech, all that can be voiced here.
And now the poem enters its final moments:Who prayed for me—my thanks
But I can’t keep anything down.
Who knew it had nothing to do
With the wind by how light
Flickered with falling knives?
No easy affirmation there; the speaker can’t keep down, presumably, food or prayers. The light outside the window is itself dangerous; the world’s a treacherous place, and yet the creaturely self relishes being alive in it. We’re taken right back to the italicized passage, midpoem, with its key line: “To death of life.” Here the poem’s central terms are placed in bald opposition, both linked and separated by the space/silence/caesura between them; they’re the two poles of the world, the inseparable north and south of things, yes and no, one and zero.
What keeps this affirmation believable and vital is, of course, how realistically guarded it is; the speaker may be “tickled / To death” to be alive, but it’s the knives that have the last word. Though here knives might be said to be good things; aren’t they the instruments of the speaker’s delivery? He tells us, after all, in “The Best Part,” that the “sweetest ingredient” of brain surgery “is the cutting. Hollow space / that longs to be filled with what little I have.” Even that violation of the creaturely self has a beauty to it; the opening of the self points to the possibility that it might be filled with something else.
But it’s not simply polarity that makes Lemon’s poem an amulet and charm against the speechlessness of suffering. The harnessing of opposites is, instead, a characteristic of his style, which is the agency of his magic.
Style, that amalgam of the found and the made, the improvised and the adapted, can be the meeting ground between self and world. A means of self-presentation is forged, and in doing so the contents of individual experience can be signaled, given shape. The pain of others—just like their joy or pleasure or wit or desire—can remain entirely invisible to us unless it is given utterance, but plainspoken language generally fails to carry much of a depth charge. Not long ago, at a university in the north of England, a reader asked me if I couldn’t just come out and say things; did I need the appurtenances of metaphor, the fancy dress of linguistic performance? No matter that to state how I’m feeling or thinking might take me a sentence or three, and not necessitate the several books of poetry and prose that she had neatly stacked on the desk in front of her, their pages marked with colored Post-it notes.
No, the crucial thing was that I couldn’t say “it,” because when named directly, abstractly, “it” vanishes. The subjective world can’t be rendered in a summation: “I nearly lost my life but now I am better,” Alex Lemon might say, but so what? That statement might move us in conversation, but on the page it’s empty. It is the made machinery of style that manages to replicate how it feels to be alive, and that’s why we require it. “I stared into my eyelids’ / Bustling magic,” Lemon writes instead, “the black / Of my hands. Oh, how darkness / Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs / & the choke of the sea.” That is direct, in its way, but it’s also thoroughly couched in style, a mode of speaking.
“This is how it must be to make a language,” Sandra McPherson writes in “Suspension: Junior Wells on a Small Stage in a Converted Barn,” a beautiful poem occasioned by listening to the blues musician Junior Wells. She should know. Like Wells, she makes her signature sound out of the found and the improvised, cobbling together variation and synthesis, working out an idiom that will stand in for the texture of subjectivity, a model of the perceiving and speaking self. Like the blues, the making of a poetic style is a triumph over speechlessness, a refiguring of the dynamics of power, a song—however flinty and peculiar—where none had seemed possible.
Style, unlike the defenseless body it is meant to clothe and to present, has a sort of permanence. John Berryman’s poems, for instance, which must be one of the ingredients of Lemon’s own wrought aesthetic, feel imbued with a sense of personality, the particular quirks of wit and bitterness. The regret and longing that fuel them are just as palpable now as they were the day the poems were written. Selfhood vanishes; style persists. As Berryman did, Lemon likes heated verbs, diction shifts (“thrummed” and “pissed”), tonal variations, a quick joke, outbursts of lyricism; he likes a poem to speed down the page. His artfully deployed stanzaic forms orchestrate our movement through his poems, arranging silences into patterns, making a music for ear and eye. He weaves a quick-shifting fabric of figurative speech that seems to keep the poem fluid, unstable. Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container for struggle, love, and delight—even, for the wounded and dumb body (“anonymous as graffiti”), an undeceived, adult form of hope.
—Mark Doty
Trembling
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
—Nietzsche
Hello friend, beautiful face
in car fire. I, the flesh wish,
am sickly wrapped in light.
I promise to wink the voyeur,
spike the drinks to a fine glow
& swallow. What happened
to your arms? Raw concrete,
bad paint? Uncapped, the bottle
can’t be broken. Voice, be amazing
circling the river bottom.
Remember fingers rattling locks,
fingers jump-starting the zipper
spine. Filleted boy. Anesthesia
is the bottle rocket. The belly.
Did you hear the rain last night,
thunder? Tomorrow, I will be
afraid. I might never wake up.
1
MRI
An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least that’s what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.
He must be eating the same hot dogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhere—smiling
in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. I’m half-
naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I don’t laugh
because I think the veined cobweb
looks like Abe Lincoln’s profile on the penny.
So let’s pretend I’m not sick at all.
I’m filled with golden tumors—
love for the nurse who feeds me
to the machine. The machine worse
than any death—the powerlessness
of a shaved & strapped-down body.
Even in purgatory you can wear earrings
& though the music might crack a spine,
at least in that torture, the tears from your arm’s
needle marks are mouth-wateringly sweet.
The Best Part
The best part of brain surgery isn’t the shining
staples that keep it all in, the ways
fingers and tongues will find the scar.
It’s not wheelchair rides through maple leaves,
sunlight warming a bruise as I fumble
peeling an orange. Nor is it the gentle tug
of a nurse reminding muscles—bend, stretch
and flex. The sweetest ingredient—
the best part is the cutt
ing. Hollow space
that longs to be filled with what little I have.
The first bite, cold fruit. Bedridden, I weigh
my glass eye in a wrinkle-mapped hand.
After
i.
Open my mouth & watch the mouse-trapped shake,
the maggot-house-meat
splayed before dogs—I am
that scab
peeled from the butcher’s midnight eyes.
Persistent scalpel—I will thorn soft
these ill-illuminated pleasures.
The mouth whips. The mouth
whips itself clean with wind.
ii.
I knife your words into trees & repeat them backwards
to feel, thieve ear to breast
like a cheat. Today I hunger
for the smallest sheen, hunger for leaves backboning
a chain-link fence.
A shattered-foot ballerina, I cross