Close Encounters

The world-bridging poetry of Ben Lerner.

- By Kamran Javadizadeh

Sometimes what you see belongs to another world. Stars. City streets on a movie screen. The remembered face of someone gone. You know it is another world because you cannot touch what you see, or because it cannot see you.

Sometimes, though, the border between this world and the other one seems to blur. An eight-year-old boy and his brother are taken by their mother's friend to the Seattle Aquarium for a sleepover beneath its underwater dome. Sharks swim overhead. Food, the visitors are told, is strictly prohibited, but when the lights dim the mother's friend produces a bag of orange candies:

They seemed to glow in the dark. My brother was thrilled, but I was horrified, maybe because I was so rarely away from my parents at night that I couldn't tolerate any sign of unpredictability in my guardian. Or maybe I thought the ban on eating was crucial for our safety, that if the sharks or rockfish somehow sensed the candies, they'd come after them, slamming their cold smooth bodies again and again into the glass until it cracked and four hundred thousand gallons of water came crashing down upon us.

The dome provides a view without the possibility of contact, a neat division of the familiar from the alien. In the child's mind, though, breaking the aquarium's rules renders that division dangerously contingent: "It must have shocked Shirley when I started to cry, to panic, repeating no, no, no, as she held the small bag toward me."The boy refuses the forbidden fruit and, at least in his adult memory, turns his attention to fortifying his would-be Eden's walls: "I remember a sleepless night, trying to keep the dome intact with the pressure of my gaze, though I probably slept for hours."