[By any measure]

By Ben Lerner b. 1979 Ben Lerner

By any measure, it was endless

winter. Emulsions with

Then circled the lake like

This is it. This April will be

Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose

early, erased for an hour

Silk-brush and ax

I'd like to think I'm a different person

latent image fading

around the edges and ears

Overall a tighter face

now. Is it so hard for you to understand

From the drop-down menu

In a cluster of eight poems, I selected

sleep, but could not

I decided to change everything

Composed entirely of stills

or fade into the trees

but could not

remember the dream

save for one brief shot

of a woman opening her eyes

Ari, pick up. I'm a different person

In a perfect world, this would be

April, or an associated concept

Green to the touch

several feet away

Source: Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

Biography

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, poet and editor Ben Lerner earned a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and was a Fulbright scholar in Madrid.

Lerner is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Mean Free Path (2010) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. His sonnet sequence, The . . .

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