The Lichtenberg Figures (2 page)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.