The Lichtenberg Figures (Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets) Read online

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  for Eric, Ed, Stephen, and Cy

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Lichtenberg Figures

  About the Author

  Books by Ben Lerner

  Links

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  §

  The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays.

  Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?

  Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek out a finer dust.

  Please feel free to cue or cut

  the lights. Along the order of magnitudes, a glyph,

  portable, narrow—Damn. I’ve lost it. But its shadow. Cast

  in the long run. As the dark touches us up.

  Earlier you asked if I would enter the data like a room, well,

  either the sun has begun to burn

  its manuscripts or I’m an idiot, an idiot

  with my eleven semiprecious rings. Real snow

  on the stage. Fake blood on the snow. Could this go

  on forever in a good way? A brain left lace from age or lightning.

  The chicken is a little dry and/or you’ve ruined my life.

  §

  I had meant to apologize in advance.

  I had meant to jettison all dogmatism in theory and all sclerosis in organization.

  I had meant to place my hand in a position to receive the sun.

  I imagined such a gesture would amount to batter, battery. A cookie

  is not the only substance that receives the shape

  of the instrument with which it’s cut. The man-child tucks

  a flare gun into his sweatpants and sets out

  for a bench of great beauty and peacefulness.

  Like the girl my neighbors sent to Catholic school, tonight

  the moon lies down with any boy who talks of leaving town.

  My cowardice may or may not have a concrete economic foundation.

  I beat Orlando Duran with a ratchet till he bled from his eye.

  I like it when you cut the crust off my sandwiches.

  The name of our state flower changes as it dries.

  §

  In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly,

  to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy. In my day,

  our fragrances had agency, our exhausted clocks complained so beautifully

  that cause began to shed its calories

  like sparks. With great ostentation, I began to bald. With great ostentation,

  I built a small door in my door for dogs. In my day,

  we were reasonable men. Even you women and children

  were reasonable men. And there was the promise of pleasure in every question

  we postponed. Like a blouse, the most elegant crimes were left undone.

  Now I am the only one who knows

  the story of the baleful forms

  our valences assumed in winter light. My people, are you not

  horrified of how these verbs decline—

  their great ostentation, their doors of different sizes?

  §

  What am I the antecedent of?

  When I shave I feel like a Russian.

  When I drink I’m the last Jew in Kansas.

  I sit in my hammock and whittle my rebus.

  I feel disease spread through me like a theory.

  I take a sip from Death’s black daiquiri.

  Darling, my favorite natural abstraction is a tree

  so every time you see one from the highway

  remember the ablative case in which I keep

  your tilde. (A scythe of moon divides

  the cloud. The story regains its upward sweep.)

  O slender spadix projecting from a narrow spathe,

  you are thinner than spaghetti but not as thin as vermicelli.

  You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.

  §

  We must retract our offerings, burnt as they are.

  We must recall our lines of verse like faulty tires.

  We must flay the curatoriat, invest our sackcloth,

  and enter the Academy single file.

  Poetry has yet to emerge.

  The image is no substitute. The image is an anecdote

  in the mouth of a stillborn. And not reflection,

  with its bad infinitude, nor religion, with its eighth of mushrooms,

  can bring orgasm to orgasm like poetry. As a policy,

  we are generally sorry. But sorry doesn’t cut it.

  We must ask you to remove your shoes, your lenses, your teeth.

  We must ask you to sob openly.

  If it is any consolation, we admire the early work of John Ashbery.

  If it is any consolation, you won’t feel a thing.

  §

  I attend a class for mouth-to-mouth, a class for hand-to-hand.

  I can no longer distinguish between combat and resuscitation.

  I could revive my victims. I could kill a man

  with a maneuver designed to clear the throat of food. Tonight, the moon

  sulks at apogee. A bitch complains to the polestar. An enemy

  fills a Ping-Pong ball with Drano and drops it in the gas tank of my car.

  Reader, may your death strictly adhere to recognized forms.

  May someone place his lips on yours, shake you gently, call your name.

  May someone interlace his fingers, lock his elbows, and compress your chest,

  every two seconds, to the depth of one and one-half inches. In the dream,

  I discover my body among the abandoned tracks of North Topeka.

  Orlando Duran stands over me, bleeding from his eye. I can no longer distinguish

  between verb moods that indicate confidence and those that express uncertainty.

  An upward emergency calls away the sky.

  §

  Pleasure is a profoundly negative experience, my father

  was fond of saying underwater. His body was carried out

  like a wish. We paid our last respects

  as rent. The mere possibility of apology allows me to express

  my favorite wreck as a relation between stairs

  and stars. I take that back. To sum up, up

  beyond the lamp’s sweep, where a drip installed by heat

  still drip
s—some tender timbers. At thirteen, I had a series

  of dreams I can’t remember, although I’m sure

  that they involved a rape. I’m brutal because I’m naked,

  not because I’m named, a distinction

  that the scientific and scholarly communities,

  if not the wider public, should be expected to maintain.

  No additional media available (but isn’t it beautiful when a toddler manages to find and strike a match).

  §

  I invite you to think creatively about politics in the age of histamine.

  I invite you to think creatively about politics

  given men as they are: asthmatic, out of tune and time,

  out of bounds and practice. I invite you to run your mouth, to run your hands

  through my thin hair like a theme. I invite you to lean your head

  against my better judgment. Once uncertainty

  ran through these sketches like a Lab. Now, of my early work, a critic has said:

  “It was open, so I let myself in.” Ladies and gentlemen,

  tonight’s weather has been canceled. The Academy has condemned

  the blue tit. The poor are stealing the saltlicks. Grenades luxuriate

  in the garden of decommissioned adjectives. It is the Sabbath. I must invite you

  to lay down your knowledge claims,

  to lay them down slowly and with great sadness.

  Given men as they are, women pack snow into jars for the summer ahead.

  Given men as they are, the trees surrender.

  §

  I’m going to kill the president.

  I promise. I surrender. I’m sorry.

  I’m gay. I’m pregnant. I’m dying.

  I’m not your father. You’re fired.

  Fire. I forgot your birthday.

  You will have to lose the leg.

  She was asking for it.

  It ran right under the car.

  It looked like a gun. It’s contagious.

  She’s with God now.

  Help me. I don’t have a problem.

  I’ve swallowed a bottle of aspirin.

  I’m a doctor. I’m leaving you.

  I love you. Fuck you. I’ll change.

  §

  True, a great work takes up the question of its origins

  and lets it drop. But this is no great work. This is a sketch

  sold on the strength of its signature, a sketch

  executed without a trial. Inappropriately formal,

  this late work reflects an inability to swallow. Once

  my name suggested female bathers

  rendered in bright impasto.

  Now it is dismissed as “unpronounceable.”

  Polemical, depressed, these contiguous black planes

  were hung to disperse museum crowds. Alas,

  a generation of pilgrim smokers

  has arrived and set off the sprinklers.

  True, abandoning the figure won’t change the world.

  But then again, neither will changing the world.

  §

  for Ronald Johnson

  The sun spalls the sluiceway into shards.

  The blind man finds an equivalent for adult films.

  The rabbi downs a hin of wine and gives

  it a rest. A votive candle is delicately set

  into a small, decorative paper bag

  weighted with sand and placed in a row

  along the dock. The poet will never walk

  again. Not even in poems.

  Lightning bugs set down their loads.

  Tonight the women have the feel of men

  who’ve worked. For you I have retired a word.

  It is the only word that never appeared in your books.

  It was the only word you didn’t know.

  It begins with the letter 0.

  §

  To forestall a suicide, I plant all manner

  of night-blooming genera. I compose this preemptive elegy.

  I describe the sky as “noctilucent.” In this very elegy,

  the sky is thus described.

  To prevent slow singing, I rub the body down

  with acacia. I pledge to hide

  the man who struck the body. I threaten to use

  the same rope or opiate but minutes after.

  To keep the neighbors from delivering all manner

  of sympathy casserole, I water the Scotch.

  I hide the Drano. I no longer park

  in the garage.

  I discover the body prone, check its breathing.

  Go back to sleep.

  §

  I confused her shadow for an accent.

  I confused her body for a simplified prose version of Paradise Lost.

  I confused her heritage for a false-bottom box.

  I confused her weeping for express written consent. “Choked with leaves”

  is the kind of thing a child would say in this rhomboid fun park and yet

  you’ve been saying it under your breath, way under, ever since

  the posse of stars rolled in. Obese with echo, Milton tips his brim.

  Twenty-one years of destroying all evidence of use has produced extensive evidence of wear.

  So I hike up my graphite trousers and set out

  for an epicenter of great beauty and peacefulness. “A major event.”

  She called the publication of a portable version “a major event.”

  She called my adjusting the clasp “a major event.”

  She confused my powerful smell for a cry from the street.

  She confused exhalation for better living through chemistry.

  §

  I must drive many miles to deliver this punch line.

  I must drive many miles in the modern manner,

  which is suicide, beneath this corrigendum of a sky. Tonight

  Orlando Duran went crazy. He smeared every doorknob,

  lock, and mirror in his apartment with spermicidal jelly.

  To expel air from the lungs suddenly

  is not to live beautifully in the modern manner. Rather

  one must learn to drive, to drive

  in the widest sense of the word, a sense that seats four

  other senses comfortably. Tonight Orlando Duran

  delivered himself in the modern manner,

  delivered himself like a punch line. Is this what he meant by

  “negative liberty,”

  by “the sound of one hand clapping is a heartbeat”?

  §

  Possessing a weapon has made me bashful.

  Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure.

  The ether of data engulfs the capitol.

  Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful.

  My oboe tars her cenotaph.

  The surface is in process.

  Coruscant skinks emerge in force.

  The moon spits on a copse of spruce.

  Plausible opposites stir in the brush.

  Jupiter spins in its ruts.

  The wind extends its every courtesy.

  I have never been here.

  Understand?

  You have never seen me.

  §

  The sky is a big responsibility. And I am the lone intern. This explains

  my drinking. This explains my luminous portage, my baboon heart

  that breaks nightly like the news. Who

  am I kidding? I am Diego Rodríguez Velázquez. I am a dry

  and eviscerated analysis of the Russian Revolution.

  I am line seven. And my memory, like a melon,

  contains many dark seeds. Already, this poem has achieved

  the status of lore amongst you little people of New England. Nevertheless,

  I, Dr. Samuel Johnson, experience moments of such profound alienation

  that I have surrendered my pistols to the care of my sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

  Forgive me. For I have taken things too far. And
now your carpet is ruined.

  Forgive me. For I am not who you think I am. I am Charlie Chaplin

  playing a waiter embarrassed by his occupation. And when the rich woman I love

  enters this bistro, I must pretend that I’m only pretending to play a waiter for her amusement.

  §

  The abolition of perspective is an innovation in perspective.

  Found matter invades the middle distance.

  Yet long after perspective has rigidified

  perspective is propped up and televised. As if the painter

  were an epiphenomenon of gesture. For many years,

  we lacked an adequate theory of decline