to a T

Jean Yoon

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 “Your absence from the syntax of my life is not
a fact to be changed by written words.”

Anne Carson
Eros the Bittersweet



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CONTACT METAMORPHISM

Whatsoever supposedly passes between us

Incinerates the future. Compact the ashes
Into a single prismatic unit. To see through it.

If we shared the moment, the memory’s mine

Alone. This time I’m tying you up. I’m melting
You down. I’m trying to see, in the light of hindsight,

Your component elements. Understand their properties,

Propensities, polarities. But the steady accretion of distance
Between us both fixes you in place and sends you

Receding across an expanse gaining density and translucence.

I keep thinking the right description will excise the pain.
I keep trying and trying to write it.

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~

In The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner writes,

“I live in the space between what I am moved to do

And what I can do,” discussing the scholar Allen

Grossman’s notion of the “virtual poem”, which

I would roughly describe as akin to the platonic

Form—theoretical ideal—of the perfect

Poem, whose transmission of its author’s

Intended e( or a-)ffect is total, seamless, hitchless,

Matchless. Peerless. Intense, but always potential—

Never surfaced. Always latent,

Never emergent. The virtual poem lives,

Undead, both submerged within

And irretrievably beyond the scope

Of the actual poem and the actual poet.

In this system based on the basic

Assumption of the impoverished conditions

For making anything with meaning,

Ben Lerner takes up that heroic position

In the difficult shadow of such great heights

He will never attain, if they can even be fathomed—

Antagonized by “not only [his] individual limitations,”

But “the structure of the art as [he] conceives it.”

The wistful premise of this impossible problem

Sets up the next seventy-seven pages, over which Lerner

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Proceeds to read the diverse works of others
And plot these poems, poets, bodies of work

Along these axes of actual-virtual, making the case

For each one’s techniques and evidences

Of failure or transcendence. In a sense, this thesis

Forces one to accept the unrealizable, insensible thing

As the only true unit of measurement. There is possibly

A tight homology here for how you meant

What you meant to me.

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BOSTON TO BUFFALO

Passed a library with your first name in western Massachusetts

And a church with your last name in upstate New York

Driving west
Through wild storms with blinding rain

Finding you remain

Persistent and proximal
Despite my continuous gains
In distance

State upon state

One thing to the next
Counting hours in miles

Driving west

Putting on Pet Sounds

My favorite album

Each song saying the same thing

Something about longing

To my chagrin

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~

I walk behind you through Forest Park, Harvard Square, down to the
beach at Race Point, at Lake Michigan, up the cliffs at Cape
Disappointment, on the raised path around the white cedar swamp. The
light is overcast and diffuse, electric, sodium-orange and romantic, dappled
through the old growth canopy. I take your hand, rub your back, carry my
old Pentax camera. I lift it to my eye, frame your figure growing smaller,
lower it. I grind a point of ice into my palm until it’s bleeding and raw. What
do you want from me? I ask you, on New Year’s Eve, breathing steam on the
snow-covered balcony, and later that night, in your house, down the street,
overlaying your long body, the light of aubades.

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~

B writes to me: is precision possible?

(If not precision, perhaps proportional relation as a means

to ascertain what you meant to me. Some precondition,
explanation of the process by which you became
something other to me than whatever you meant to be. If
anything. Trying to imagine what it was you intended to
happen in light of the hindsight that I can now afford to see
with. Distance brings this to light. I now know how one can
say lots of things and believe that one means them while
knowing that they are untrue. As in: I wanted only to be
with you.)

A writes to me: there is a way out of me and towards or into you.

(Thrashing against language—each time I try to break it, I

come close and fail. But could I at least bring up the rate of
repetition such that the rapidity might assume a forced,
illusory continuity, as if filmic? What was that, about
repetition and difference? My free hand moves
surreptitiously to my thigh, wet with sweat.)

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~

You introduced me to Ben Lerner’s work

In 2013; by your recommending, I read Leaving

the Atocha Station, mostly in lieu of writing

My undergraduate thesis and completing

Other time-sensitive tasks. Perhaps the analysis

That follows was influenced by the fact of all

That I was avoiding doing when I read it. I both resented

And enjoyed it—a sensation median to plain disgust

And a mix of envy, sympathy, and identification

With the narrator’s incessant, narcissistic, self-

Abnegation, aspirations to engage with other humans

From a place of good intentions

While relentlessly arranging every instance

Of misunderstanding and -communication

Into an evidential analysis whose every point

Reaffirms and redeems the fraught image of the virile poet

Of stature which he claims to disdain while longing

To embody. I could see why you liked it—it had that

Ego-ourobouros, psych-out contained

In latinate phrasings, solipsism sharped

To a restlessly driving point (you also

like Pynchon, David Foster Wallace). The precision

And specificity of the prose dazzles, its details energized

By the stream-of-consciousness narrative style

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Which bucks the straightforward flow of chronological
Time in favor of an associative vortex that bends

One’s attention toward the axis of a voracious self-obsession

And drags one in—whose dynamism relies not on plot,

But on the sheer force of the narrator’s thought

Process, and accordingly his inordinate, impassioned

Fluxes of ego in response to mundane events

Which transfigures them into signs that point

Ever back to himself. It’s true to his perspective;

it’s masterful and relentless. It cuts so close

To my own experience. It’s almost as if

I could have written it. However,

This possibility is forever withheld by at least one

Irreducible margin, meaning that to successfully

Identify myself with Lerner or his putative narrator

Would not only require eliding certain specific

Facts of my body—I am not a white male, for instance—

But would entail buying into the very sleight

Of transposition that allows us to call it a work

Of art, a fiction, when one places himself

At the gravitational center of things that happen to him

And that therefore, he gets to decide what they mean,

A privilege I refuse because I can’t use it.

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~

E writes to me: sever, sever, sever.

(If I loved you, let it fall, away from me like leaves, how
light leaves this room in the early evening, while I remain
in place, less and less ostensibly distinct from its discrete
elements, returning to a state more chromatically
continuous with this chair, the credenza, the stucco ceiling
above me.)

Y says to me: but not every poem needs to be a

maximalism of your intellect.

(But it must be possible—which is not to say ideal.)

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~

In The Hatred Of Poetry, Ben Lerner argues

For a contingent position regarding the artform

Insofar as one can either fall short of summoning

The Poem that one desires to manifest in the poem

Or intentionally gesture to that irreconcilable gap.

We never shared a true community, failed

To establish a basic premise of mutual respect,

Fucked too few times spread over five years, and broke

Every boundary we set out to set

In a halfhearted effort to break the repetitious

Circuit of our dysfunctional habits

Of relating, communicating.

We can learn to hurt ourselves so well

Our wounds reveal themselves as habits

Of speaking in ways so widely comprehensible

As to be undetectable as evidence or index

Of pain. When your hands moved to my body

With your signature exactitude, the resulting

Frequency undid the tensile makeup of myself.

It was so tight and precise an immolation, so consistent

From bedframe to forgotten bedframe.

I know now that these dissolutions

Were the integral glue that fixed

You in the phrase-form: I long for you.

I longed to exit

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History with you; the catch and thus

The release was that I believed

We were searching together , whereas

In fact you were, in a way, yourself, the trap.

People say “The X of my dreams”. You seemed

To fit the type to a T. I’d be remiss

To paint this picture and omit the pleasure

I’m taking in elaborating my metaphors

By means of further metaphor. In kind,

You would grind my attention to a singular function

Like a disposable glove. I poured all the love

I cultured for you into the forge of mechanical friction.

The key was the moment of culmination,

Watching you shudder under me, utterly

Gone. The more I go on wringing

This overwet image, the further I drain this well of mourning,

The more I uncover, the deeper you burn.

Former lover, addressee, partial basis/battery

To the portable torch of my most begrudged,

Generic, shamefully normal fantasies. I felt love

And figured it was for you. Made love,

Imagined it was with you.

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~

Distance made you seem smaller—more lovable—and your affectations

more diffuse—more loving.

Whatever I opened, you declared broken. I took this to mean anything

could be fixed, that it was merely a question of vision and revision.

The closer I get, the higher resolution, the farther I move from the original
need.

Paused on the stair, I’m approaching the perfect phrasing of what I should
have said on the landing:

I tried to gorge myself on your hunger

for me, and I succeeded, which was
also a kind of failure.



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~

But in a tent on a hill in Western Massachusetts condensated after rain,

in a borrowed Toyota coming back from the coast, with Arthur

Russell playing,

in the chemistry building, in the basement, after midnight,

in your grandparents’ house on a San Diego vista,

on the outermost point of the Cape,

in the cold hug of fog all around us, on a wet cliff in Oregon,

in a vegan diner in Cambridge,

again and again in the slow golden light of midweek afternoons in

my second apartment,

I really thought, for a moment, we had made it.

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NOSTALGIA

In stillness—a terminal
Degree of movement—again and again
I find you, cupped

In the bottommost divot,

Your worn strings floating
Up the zero

Gravity, sickly
Dappled in the muddy
Greenish light of night vision.

If you are looking to be pulled up


From the depth from which
You seem to be beckoning, first

I beg of you, honey: disclose

At once your terrible vow.

And then when we surface,

Leave me completely—speak

Your way out of my mouth.

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~

How I dream you are timing me trying to carve

Your figure out of too small a cut of marble. How I lost

Years of my life to the task of ungluing

The mask from the man from the monument.

How I dream you are watching me from behind

A small white book, looking not quite

At me but rather at the point where,

On your screen, I presumably appear.

[sung:] “Here I am, once again / Just torn

Into pieces / Can’t deny it, can’t pretend /

I thought you were the one.” How with each ending

We exited one level up, each iteration

Of the problem innovating despite

Each time my resolving to evade, at all cost,

The next time, the same thing, unwittingly

Resetting the stage for the same choreography,

Same gestures of leaving, same talk of moving on, then

Again drawn to your gravity, which was not

Unlike that of a dying star. How, like that light arriving

From light years away, at significant delay,

Maybe this love, irreducible to lesson or metaphor,

Was coming for me all along. How I wonder what you are.

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 JEAN YOON is a writer and interdisciplinary artist
based for the moment in South Bend, Indiana, where they are
finishing their MFA in Creative Writing. Their poems, essays,
videos, and installations have been published in various print and
online journals, shown in galleries and homes, and squirreled
away in hard drives and notebooks. Jean also sings and plays
synth in FLESHBAND.

@zenpartymix

dbswlsdl.xyz

© 2017

Ghost City Press

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