Ben Lerner

Tonight I can’t remember why

everything is permitted or,

what amounts to the same thing,

forbidden. No art is total, even

theirs, even though it raises

towers or kills from the air,

there’s too much piety in despair

as if the silver leaves behind

the glass were politics

and the wind they move in

and the chance of scattered

storms. Those are still

my ways of making and

I know that I can call on you

until you’re real enough

to turn from. Maybe I have fallen

behind, am falling, but

I think of myself as having

people, a small people

in a failed state, and love

more avant-garde than shame

or the easy distances.

All my people are with me now

the way the light is.

Love brought these readers into the world

The cuplike structures

of their eyes were formed

inherited color, and love

and argument must be conducted differently now

that the sounds through the wall

are interpreted, and a gentle

relentless pressure has been placed

on the page. I paid someone to care for them so I

could pattern these vowels and one

is eight and asking me each

night to read what I’ve made

in what they call my office

I am afraid

they will understand it or won’t, will see

something they should

not remember when I’m gone, the voice that is

mine only in part must be kept

safe from them. They are too trivial

my offices, too intimate, it isn’t labor

I cannot bring my daughters to work

or not bring them

here. They have learned to pause

at the end of lines, they want to know if I have met

Amanda Gorman, debate

if it has to rhyme and what rhyme is

is difference, segmentation, how emphasis falls

is brushed away. So I keep

two notebooks, one where I write

for them in the half

hour before pickup, while this one holds a place

or no place where it breaks, I’m not sure what

open. Desire they cannot know

and will, the sense of false position

for which I’ve been rewarded, this house, fantasy

I had at her age that my father was

replaced by a man who resembled him

is a cliché, the words

the faces interchangeable

of the father. But soon they began to blur

together in my mind

because the rhyme my girls

demanded spread, as difference tends

and sameness. So I read from the wrong one

what I’d been working on

and it was this, the changes I’ve made

were these, and the love I gave

received. Though it wasn’t a game or song

they played and sang along