The Lichtenberg Figures
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for Eric, Ed, Stephen, and Cy
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 drips—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”?