Happy birthday, Brendan Lorber! Celebrate by reading these Lorber poems we published in 2019! After that, go read Lorber’s “How a Poem Happens to Happen”!
The working musicians
Nights make way for each other
or the musicians do when it’s working
Conversationally it’s become unclear
who’s the drowning sailor and who’s
the sea Whatever we talk about
talks back about us or who we made
ourselves lost to as though
it’s a pleasure to hear of the face
plants not yet taken to the bridge
A long life of short songs as a musician
whose favorite instruments are dead
trees filled with cicadas or the weird
thumping sound made by someone
who shows no other sign of having
had a heart Maybe it’s enough
to be slightly stifled by never being
stopped from talking about music
or politics or any of those silly things
except by being told they are silly
that leave us to wonder in the aftermath
if it was a cool hang we romanticized
or a romance we almost got the hang of
All the topics to keep what one’s
demons might take as encouragement
to pull off what’s left of the day
like a shirt you didn’t want to be
wearing anymore or any clothes
in fact in the challenging dual
presence of your mind and body
that you can’t take anymore but still
count it off on to take it to the bridge
Unjustified true belief
I have a wealth of insider information
from the tiniest spaces Like the inside
of a toilet paper roll or the part of an olive
where the pimento fell out that you hold
before your eye as a Kalamata runner-up
to the world’s most powerful telescope
in search of far-off problems to bring
home like opening for your favorite band
instead of the other way around or searching
for a way off the spectrum of visible
fretwork where you only either yearn
for the good life or fear for losing it and
so keep cranking out the plans for everyone
else and they’re like No thanks weirdo
We’ve got our own concealed level of
expertise to stumble over the edge of
into something accurate but unjustifiable
The party lasted years but not this year
I’d get rid of the bees but I need the honey
inside this idea of how to grow Even
the belief there was nothing new wasn’t
new which either proved the point or
destroyed it the way 2019 waved goodbye
to everything remarkable and good
with such conviction I almost forgot 1986
did the same thing and so did 1977
I can’t remember the last time someone
failed to tell me the only constant is
change not in a cool Stephen Hawking
way but in the way someone explains how
no you should be excited to get laid off
Every year we get a little more of doing
more with less The kind of trembling you
just can’t shake Some people work for a mean
boss who means well but poorly I work
for living indoors and feeding my daughter
And I love bees just not in my tiny apartment
I’m writing this in my head at the office party
which I attend for the free food and memories
of this place from another time There was
the party where I discovered the art of
the I am making an important point gesture
and most photos since invoke this mudra
I am making an important point not connected
to completely freaking out about the unknown
future and trying to trick the rest of each year
into believing I am not to be fucked with
You should know I have leveled up and
away from even limited success into
categories more aligned with natural calamity
The way professing my undying and obviously
unrequited love to Andrea when we were five
or Karen a decade later was both a terrible idea
at the time and for all time but explains
my current state of incredibly awkward soulfulness
A kind of stammering heart filled with bees
Family feudalism
We were friends I think though mostly the kind
where they tell you No the line forms over there
when you get to the front and so we’re not anymore
except I’d still call if I needed you to remove a
bullet or some lower drama equivalent and once
almost did but the problem got resolved abruptly
by revealing itself to have been less a problem
than a lingering fealty to some long gone system
like the Shogonate or early internet so maybe
our falling out wasn’t real either because
we were never friends to begin with A feudal
ambiguity or capitalist or Sumerian everything
is hard to say and those that are easy like Nice
to see you have all the certainty of election day
morning or of this very poem until some toxicity
steps out of itself into a we have to talk moment
as a shortcut to being a work of art as though
a poem or friendship could be an exchange of ideas
instead of the weird spaceship or abandoned soccer
arena that they are where the ideas spontaneously
generate whether anyone’s around to notice
Longest year of the day
Each day lasts thousands of years on Mercury
the I’m not touching you planet so close to the sun
A fact you spent your whole life not knowing
until now For the rest of your life it is always
the day you learned this also the day your parents died
or your wedding day if you’re more optimistic
I’m optimistic that I’m going to get paid though not
with money or affection or for my research
such as it could be called that Paid the way
inactive ingredients are the ones that give you
the weird dreams later almost visitations that leave
you wondering if death kind of comes and goes
I’m told by a stranger that in Italy when a child
has a fever they are burning everything they need
to lose in order to grow A fever is the tidal-locked
Mercury of the body All your dead relatives return
from their thousand-year daytrip and the first thing
they tell you is the title of a poem or how grief
on Mars is even more complicated where you
look from some flyer in your hand back up
to the person who took their time passing it over
and are like Oh hi grandma I thought you had
been taken by time or a friend taken before theirs
and they’re half smiling back at you their face in orbit
around ten ideas of how each new day works it
Hunter with a heart of mist
My calling calls me by the wrong name like
Brandon or Artemis but it’s okay my calling
is busy and I’m not sure I could say what
my calling is projected through although it
definitely takes place between the realization
summer has been totally upholstered for three
weeks already a chair into which we’ve slouched
so far there’s zero chance we could get up
without an enthusiastic team pulling us between
that and the startling whoosh of autumn’s
arrival in the form of a bus half a step over
as we stroll into the street looking the wrong way
The problem can be better understood in deep
sea creatures where the only thing worse than
their eyesight is a sense of time We can see
to the horizon or at least as far as East 4th Street
where the Bowery staggers to trace the path
of a one-legged Dutch settler and later an Ashcan
School painter with a sketchbook and bad
circulation My calling was to curse newcomers
to the neighborhood which gave way to nothing
but nostalgia for their arrival I stop to reflect
so many times that saying I don’t know what
do you do? is the only valid answer to being
asked because then I get to be the mirror I am
That and constantly emerging from some memory
or anxious projection into what I think of as this
moment the way a sharp vibration in your heel
will make you realize the sidewalk is solid
but only for an inch or two and under that who knows
or the moment someone is peeing on a pregnancy test
A golden baby shower ahead of the more formal
baby shower with games and naming conventions
Now that it’s 8:15 I know some things
I am extremely lucky but very little of it
is good except in the educational sense
of having learned my lesson today or maybe
someone else’s Someone whose panic attacks
are like the instrumental bridge that gets
us out the door and into the next scene
The next scene being the sort of bubble
sorted re-alphabetizing of our tenure-track
aspirations to wake up after last night’s
damage or the longer term bone loss over
the many such wash and rinse repetitions
The present always saunters along out of
what we mistook for the present a minute ago
where so many imposters call the past and future
home but the real one under a little cap
of steam that warns you not to touch it
for awhile is a decision tree chopped down
and burned to fuel the even newer analytical
engine whose elaborate fixity can’t keep up either
Despite our expertise everything fans out
further like a scalp massager with extra
tiny wires at the end of each wire and
more tinier wires at the end of those or
the confrontational presence on the sidewalk
of a signed first edition of the book that
changed your life with a sign on it that says
Take Me but also says Probably No Bedbugs
One has to take a stand
The lunch I want is always for display only
An affectionate display like the two t’s
in letters make a show of holding hands
at the expense of even the immediate future
in which they build a word together and instead
make a little roof a gazebo in the middle
of a thought too small to turn around
if things don’t work out between them
The breakfast I had was just as guilty if not
much more than a dollop of swallowed toothpaste
or the freshly drizzled coffee on my pants
on the subway en route to the afternoon
I was grateful for a gazebo to rest in
the way believing dinosaurs had scales
is a kind of rest a mistaken justification
for our own leathery human dominance
They had feathers of course and our rise
like the gazebo’s from an otherwise wild meadow
is always drawn back to the generative lie
The gazebo’s built-in belatedness that no matter
what year it is you missed the picnic and band
by a hundred summers with its tubas and bunting
But there was never either Gazebos are all
seven years old I would never presume
to tell you what to do but once you’re inside
you can’t do anything but retrace your steps
from the ramshackle shed of tears and find
the architectural antidote to having arms in order
to hold people exactly that distance away
That thing I sometimes get
Arrive home to discover your keys
are in your pants but these pants
aren’t yours or even pants despite
how you’re wearing them We can
always tell who it is receiving the win
or not the win but the rough diagnosis
Harder to pull off is divination
between the frisson of an unbeatable hand
and tingling extremities of a stroke
We know it’s underway but not what it is
nor the rules by which the clutching at us
is playing Mortality always had the key
but still announces itself on the intercom
only I can hear I’m coming up! But
then it doesn’t which explains both
how I’m able to relate this and also
the twenty expressions on my face as I do
The device I use to wipe the grin off
is akin to miniature community building
by the light of the solar flare which is
normal or underwater chess where you
hold your breath for the duration of the game
or cross-country sleep skiing or competitive
eczema or simply pushing the barbed
arrow through till it comes out the other
side and you can just get on with your day
Gnawstruck
A dog I love loves chewing everything else
I love and some things I’m just okay with
my face which is difficult because
my face is a lot like faces that don’t exist
except in memory And this dog his face
even more so like others who are otherwise
unlike him except in having adopted the idea
of trying on being born Not a great idea
but even for us the idea is arrived at before
we turn up to think it I think and without it
there are no others beyond traveling light
that is as pure light half particle half wave
half Rilke or some other third shoe dropping
Our inability to find an answer is assurance
that there is one or that my charm is just
a way of not being uneasy by my own side
by not having a side to be by until the very
act of telling you how I am today refutes
the intimation that I am anything other
than an idea this dog had shortly after
running out of more traditional dog thoughts
What was once a given is now given over
to something with teeth that demands
you be gnawed by them to be allowed
further passage into the tender world
It’s like launch codes whispered to a dog
that the dog being better at sticks than
ignition didn’t quite catch And pants
a little to let us know our only shot is
that one of the steps we took was wrong
