The Lichtenberg Figures (3 page)

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her own unpublished dissertation.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, moonlight 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.

You asked me to explain the peculiar power of continental literary criticism,

to clarify what I mean by “theory” in the sentence

“To clarify what I mean by theory in the sentence.”

The impossibility of referring to the interruption immanent in the referential chain.

Snowfall in North Topeka.

The impossibility of not referring to the immanent interruption.

Real persons, living or dead, resembled coincidentally.

Orlando imbued my body with erotic significance

by beating it with a pistol. Nothing is as metaphysical

as the claim to break from metaphysics. At a party in his honor,

we throw our hands in the air. We wave them like we just don’t care.

Then bullets tore through the soft tissue of our episteme.

We had thought that by arranging words at random

we could avoid ideology. We were right.

Then we were terribly wrong. Such is the nature of California.

What I remember most about the Renaissance

is that everything had tits. Streetcars, sunsets,

everything
. Defacing a medium

just for the F of it—

that was my idea. It was 1865;

no one was worried about positivism.

You can argue with our methods

but not with our methodology.

So a couple of janitors lost their legs.

Today, some of my best friends are janitors.

“Is this seat taken?” I don’t understand the question.

“Was there ever any doubt?” Below the knees.

“Can you forgive me?” I hardly even know you.

“Does it have meat in it?” I’m not at liberty to say.

“Am I going to be
OK?
” Yes and no.

“How long was I asleep?” That remains to be seen.

“Have you met my mother?” I won’t dignify that with an answer.

“Do you love me?”

“Which would you prefer?” Long ago.

“Can you hear me?” In the pejorative sense.

“How do I know it’s really you?” Not exactly.

“Did you do the reading?” I do not love you.

“Swear on your life?” Swear on my life.

“Do you want me to leave?” Little by little.

King of Beers, King of Pop, King of Kings;

proud sponsor of rain dance and mercy killing,

Special Olympiad and circumcision;

moviegoer, meat eater, Republican: bless

my girlfriend, bless each chicken finger, the commute

to Brooklyn, watch over her hard drive and suspicious mole,

forgive her smoking, protect her from anthrax

and obesity, Scud and Rohypnol. If she is groped at a bar,

if she is cursed by a cabbie, if she loses her job,

repeal the moon, send a plague through nicotine patch

and cell phone, empty your seven bowls on the G7,

numb the penis, crash an airliner into the North Star. Destroy

with fire, short sword, and sulfur, then destroy

fire, short sword, and sulfur. Destroy me. Then destroy her.

In those days partial nudity was permitted

provided the breasts in question hung from indigenes.

The clouds had an ease of diction,

and Death had a way with women,

and at night our documents opened

to emit their redolent confessions.

In those days whole onions, whole peoples were immersed

in the pellucid, semisolid fat of hogs.

The children ran lines of powdered gold,

huffed glue composed of studs,

smoked burial myrrh, and then shot up

their schools.

In those days police hauled in all bugs, then birds, then stars,

and the sky fled underground.

Idle elevators of grain. Plenty of parking. Deciduous trees

of the genus
U lm us
, known for their arching branches and serrate leaves

with asymmetrical bases. Gunplay in our houses of steak,

houses of pancakes. Dried valerian rhizomes. Bunk weed. Osage.

Deliberately elliptical poetic works reflect a fear of political commitment after 1968.

A fear of deliberately elliptical poetic works reflects...

Home considered as a system of substitutions: “Plenty of parking.

Deciduous elevators of the genus
Gunplay
,

known for their arching bases and serrate pancakes

with asymmetrical rhizomes.” The activation of the white space of the page

reflects a fear of the industrialization of print media.

To fear the activation of the white space of the page

is to fear poetry.

Idle elliptical commitment. Deciduous repetition. Plenty of parking.

Blood on the time that we have on our hands.

Blood on our sheets, our sheets of music.

Blood on the canvases

of boxing rings, the canvases of Henri Matisse.

The man-child faints at the sight of blood

and so must close his eyes

as he dispatches his terrier

with a pocketknife. Tonight,

blood condensed from atmospheric vapor

falls to the earth. It bleeds three inches.

Concerts are canceled, ball games delayed.

In galoshes and slickers, the children play.

An arc of seven spectral colors appears opposite the sun

as a result of light refracted through the drops of blood.

The author gratefully acknowledges the object world.

Acknowledgment is gratefully made

to Sleep:
A Journal of Sleep
.

The author wishes to thank the foundation,

which poured its money into the sky.

A grant from the sky made this project impossible.

Lerner, Benjamin, 1979–1945

My death was first runner-up at the 1996 Kansas State Wrestling Championships (157 lbs).

My death is the author of
Céar Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry
.

My death was the first death in my family

to ever graduate from college.

My death graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

Your death was the 1996 Kansas State Wrestling Champion (157 lbs).

Your death is the author of César Vallejo’s
Trilce
.

Your death was the third death in your family

to deliver a commencement address

at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her death doesn’t care about your death’s fame or physique.

Her death is the author of
Tungsten
, César Vallejo’s social-realist experiment.

Her death likes to run her hands through what’s left of my death’s hair.

Her death would like to start a family.

She left town. Rain ensued. Crows pecked out my contacts.

I tried everything: Prozac, plainsong. I won her back.

It didn’t help. I shot myself. It didn’t help.

A beauty incommensurate with syntax

had whupped my cracker ass.

When I was fair and young and favor graced me

my fingers were in everybody’s mouth.

Ten fat fingers in ten fat mouths.

Now my fingers just point stuff out.

She shot herself. And, with a typically raucous cry,

her glossy, black body fell from the typical sky.

It fell like rain. It was rain. Fat drops of rain rained down

into my fat awaiting mouth.

It didn’t help.

In my culture, when a woman dies, we sleep on the floor.

We sleep with her sister. We put her cats to sleep.

We tear at our hair. We tear at the hair of others.

We pass roseate urinary calculi. We dream ourselves hoarse.

In my culture, when a woman dies,

we mash the effervescent abdomens of fireflies

into mascara for the long-lashed corpse.

Virga is customary. Light opera is customary.

An exchange of fluids, of fire, is customary. It is customary to spike

the Berry Blue Kool-Aid with cyanide. Customarily,

starlings collide. And yes, of course,

after the potluck, when we’ve put the children to sleep,

we bathe the widower in lilac, dress him in bombazine,

and reduce him to ash.

The light lines up to die. The light dies down.

Out of embarrassment, the light dies out.

At 7:32
CST
, the light is pronounced dead.

The light’s death is pronounced

“Ayúdame.”

The first female president was César Vallejo.

César Vallejo was the first African American in space.

Indicted child pornographer, César Vallejo.

Vallejo, aka Eshleman, aka Lerner.

Perdóname.

The endless miserable progression of Thursdays.

Miserable progression of glottal stops.

That “palindrome” is not a palindrome.

Endless miserable progression of decimals.

In the early ’oos, my concern with abstraction

culminated in a series of public exhalations.

I was praised for my use of repetition. But, alas,

my work was understood.

Then the towers collapsed

and antimissile missiles tracked

the night sky with ellipses.

I decided that what we needed was a plain style,

not more condoms stuffed with chocolate frosting.

After six months in my studio, I emerged

and performed a series of public exhalations.

Only time will tell

if my work is representational.

Only time will tell if time will tell.

It is always already winter.

Raccoons open each other for warmth.

The poor live under the bridge outside of time.

If we can speak of the poor. If you can call that a bridge.

At a fashionable retrospective, a woman soils her prewar dress.

In order to avoid saying “I,” the author eats incessantly.

The author experiences pleasure from a great distance,

like the bombing of an embassy. In the business district,

fire is exchanged. The media butcher the suspect’s name.

Every weekend, the law gets laid,

while these abstractions, hung like horses,

attend their semiformals stag. The last census

counts several selves inhabiting this gaze,

mostly unemployed.