10 by Ben Lerner Read Free Book Online

could bring some poems, as she was reading a little to Bernard when he wasn’t sleeping.
    I took the 5 train back to Brooklyn, undercooked and ate spaghetti, and then started to pace my apartment, trying to decide what poetry to bring. Four hours later it looked as though my apartment had been ransacked or had endured a seismic event. I’d pulled dozens of books from the unfinished pine shelves, stirring up dust, and then discarded them in piles on the floor, either because the book in question was a gift from Bernard or Natali, or a book they had published, or a book they’d written, and so it seemed a failure of imagination to select it, or because I knew or feared it was a poet they didn’t like, or because the poems were too elegiac, or too long to be read to Bernard in his condition. I was growing increasingly desperate, my worry about Bernard now compounded by the ridiculous worry that bringing the wrong book would somehow invalidate their trust in me as their executor, expose me as unworthy. Added to that was the shame I began to feel when I realized that, if I were in Bernard’s position, I wouldn’t even think about literature, would just be asking for morphine and distracting myself, if possible, with reality TV, a line of thought that then led me to imagine recovering, or failing to recover, from open-heart surgery.
    I lay on the floor and watched the slow rotation of the ceiling fan and found it a little difficult to breathe as all the temporal orders broke over me: Bernard and Natali were succumbing to biological time; they had asked me and my aorta to conduct their writing into the future, a future I increasingly imagined as underwater; none of the past was usable—I couldn’t find, in my apartment full of books, a single page of it to bring to the same hospital where they’d measured my limbs and, depending on insurance, might inseminate my friend.
    Then out of nowhere, as if descending from the ceiling, the right poet came to me: William Bronk. I remembered how Bernard had told me he’d met Bronk just once, and neither had said much; they’d had lunch or coffee in congenial if mildly awkward silence. Bernard believed Bronk was one of the great and underappreciated poets of the second half of the twentieth century. A decade later, after Bronk’s death, Bernard had told me, he met a graduate student who had been a distant relation or family friend of Bronk’s and had gotten to know the poet in his later years. The graduate student was always talking about Bronk as if Bernard and Bronk were dear friends, as if they’d known each other since childhood, which Bernard found a little puzzling. After the fifth or sixth conversation in which the student tried to reminisce with Bernard about Bronk, about the kind of man he was, Bernard felt it necessary to explain to the student that, while he admired the poetry tremendously, he’d only met Bronk once, and briefly, that he had no sense of him as a person. The student was shocked: But he always spoke about you, he said to Bernard, about how you’d sought him out, about how well you got along, the understanding between you, etc. One of the main reasons I came here to study with you was because of your relationship. I imagine Bernard saw the world rearrange itself around the student.
    Wallace Stevens, I remember Bernard telling me on another occasion, had heavily influenced two poets Bernard particularly loved: Ashbery, whom everyone rightly celebrated, and Bronk, who was largely unknown. Ashbery wrote in color, Bernard said, whereas Bronk wrote in black and white; Ashbery embraced Stevens’s lushness, whereas Bronk stripped it down, as if Stevens were being translated into a limited vocabulary. As a result, Bronk’s poetry was suspended between philosophical heft and an almost autistic linguistic simplicity, a combination that, I must say, had never really worked for me: I’d read all his books out