Dreampad

by Jeff Latosik

  Stand straight and just be read, my dear, my darling,

  as if it wasn’t that there were too many things

  to name but too many right words

  is another way of saying what I’m approaching.

  * The dialogue in direct quotes is taken from Nick Laird reading his poem “Feel Free” on The New Yorker website.

  RED GIANT

  Composed of simple stuff that would make fluff

  look Byzantine, it can never have enough

  of itself and so it’s screwed.

  A night light, though, from eons back,

  some core fuel burning like a childhood

  in the black, and it grows and glows

  and it consumes. Would that we knew

  the kink in things that when you’ve burned

  through all your credit you’re just given more

  but under different circumstances.

  And how you might, unstuck from a lucky streak,

  rummage through a closet as a red dress

  falls across the bed like a solar flare.

  When a giant grows, it’s also said that narrow zones

  once inhabitable become somehow temperate

  as if where none were for life, now there are chances.

  Look into one of those videos, concentric circles

  of a supernova going off, and it becomes

  a spotting scope, lens opening leaf by leaf,

  and through it I swear it’s possible to see

  the one thing that you swore you couldn’t do.

  THE HOME CHECKLIST

  Some general comingling of space

  and location. Also, not sinking.

  You laugh. But something set back

  dare I say plain,

  but spruce-able with small

  and unobtrusive alterations.

  Plenty of closet space.

  That one is a must.

  Fenced where needed, open where not.

  You know, the general ethos

  you could just see yourself

  having a beer with?

  Ranked school nearby but perhaps

  out of earshot. No powerline static.

  Minimal landscaping of the greenery required.

  For that matter, no attic.

  No tenant apartment

  in which a family member might hunker.

  All main lines wired. Fibrehood ready.

  Gas leaks not common. All sockets modern.

  Yes, if a deal can be struck

  then we’ll go over asking.

  What was it, again,

  that we were asking?

  SKY POOL

  My vision for the sky pool stemmed from a desire to push the boundaries in the capability of construction and engineering. I wanted to do something that had never been done before. The experience of the pool will be truly unique, it will feel like floating through the air in central London.

  —Sean Mulryan, chairman and CEO of the Ballymore Group

  One day it was there. A bridge you could swim.

  And people you truly couldn’t hear

  doing their butterflies and backstroke laps

  ten stories up. Oh, the glass floor must

  have made a person feel like they were moonlighting

  as an astronaut or had become half water-dwelling

  even when a storm passed through and girders creaked.

  And when the girl went under in the public pool

  at street level and wouldn’t breathe and all went

  quiet as shadows do at a repair, somebody

  was still swimming way, way up there.

  So it seemed the arm span, turning,

  was a soul loosed from this night and crawling

  in the chlorine hue. When she was back, and the fright

  that she had made declared, a wind did shake

  the bistro sets as if there was, still, some spell we couldn’t break.

  A MILE FROM THE BAY OF BISCAY ON TOUR WITH ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER

  On a sleeper coach outside of Bayonne, by way of Utrecht,

  one Daniel “Oneohtrix Point Never” Lopatin, opening act

  for Nine Inch Nails, reclines in his cabin view and tweaks the buttons

  on his Roland SP-555 as they light up and go dark with synths.

  Which always makes him think of Bushwick with its bodegas

  and flickering, its embarrassment of windows,

  and doesn’t then the transport I tuned up just to get him there

  almost tip over a rock face in the South France air,

  and with it towns and churches sitting in the hills like Frisbees sit

  beyond their throwers, fenced out, lost, and all this

  threatens to go down with him, but fear not, fair rider—

  a belt fan’s blown and with it smoke and coasting

  and so there’s time to kill. Ah, rural anemone but with no vehicle

  or as the French say, Comme il faut. Let’s say it’s summer,

  so he steps outside and hikes a road beside a field of bright canola.

  Suddenly he’s by himself, except he’s got his sampler

  and the sky’s not breathing static yet and no window-plain glass

  so nothing for the man who told him last year

  outside of Saint Vitus that he was once a law professor at Rutgers,

  and he knew most glass so well that he could ballpark

  the money in a recycling bin down to the penny.

  And so Lopatin sits down on a patch of grass

  and rekindles a loop from a song he wouldn’t say

  and twisted to the side the sampler’s pitch-shifted

  to a building in the skyline lighting up its bright interiors.

  So he’s remembering buildings so clear with glass

  they are their own reflections, like you could ring

  each like a brandy snifter and hear the most pleasing electro pop.

  But could you? No. And did the woman who once lived

  two storeys up from his old stomping ground in Winthrop

  and whom he saw bare-breasted once by accident

  really disappear under a rift of snow deep in Colorado

  despite what the palmist once said of having a son?

  Sky shades to question, like hooks to sung refrain,

  loopy little roads will highway out. But Lopatin’s not mulling on this:

  he’s on a tour bus lane of thought that goes on unseen to me,

  and to try to follow it is to end up in The Hub in Edinburgh

  in front of the Roland Juno-60 “Judy” he’s known for longer

  than he’s known anyone but his parents, and he’s, hood on,

  ripping up a set that has the whole audience lifting swing tops in

  appreciation.

  Meanwhile, he turns to me and says, Hey, man, what am I doing here,

  I’m due in Maastricht by sundown, or, at the very least

  this is a concert and frankly you’re interrupting. So,

  I’m flattered but sit down, know better that the line is fixed

  and it may be clever but you’re going to have to live there.

  THE EASTERN MASSASAUGAS

  There are maybe two dozen left

  in the Carolinian Zone, so one bad snow

  or, hell, a heavy rain could put out

  that last living flame of keratin.

  Odd, then, that they’re tattooed

  in blots that look like hourglasses

  as if they were the muscle

  time sent out to collect its dues.

  And true—should one sink its position

  against health care-for-all into your shin,

  you’ll find there is a shortest route

  to the anti-venom that costs

  twenty thousand dollars for a vial and doesn’t keep.

  But I remember camp counsellors

  in Tobermory used to carry axes

  on their belts to behead the ones

&nb
sp; appearing on the rocks to sun

  leaving a mob of boys so quiet

  it occurs now that they had

  still only seen about five hundred Sundays

  in their lives, had no words yet

  for that strangely quiet stomping dance.

  Perhaps there are no words.

  So the Massasaugas are collected up

  gravid female by female through sheer luck

  or some circumstance we could undo

  if we knew how. Once, up in Parry Sound,

  I came across a brood of them sunning

  and I’ve since asked my father how he kept his cool

  with that sound like pushing sand straight

  through the sun. You know, he said,

  they must be multiplying in your memory now

  because that never happened.

  2.

  TROUBLESHOOT

  Eventually, you have to call. And you’re met,

  as ever, by the range of choices your qualm half fits,

  a cache of wants crushed on a touchpad of options

  that feel as though they’ve been free-floating

  and present forever. Each selection

  another wing of an office as every door

  locks behind once it’s closed and stairwells

  are numerous. Some agreeable music, too,

  if you knew to what you were agreeing,

  and the effervescent pre-recorded voice

  disembodied as the suiciders in Dante

  tape-looping a script that only ever

  accentuates the bits of silence stitching it together.

  And what’s the real trouble? You’ve gone off the grid,

  the tether that bound you has slipped

  and you’ve spelunked into a crevasse

  of unseeing and not being tended.

  Ho hum. Cue the scrum of sound bites

  that collect there: It just is what it is.

  But another inkling lingers,

  one possible outcome on the other end not picking up,

  and it flashes as a fever dream of speed and distance

  collapsed, of clearing the barriers, of access,

  and that general particulate: being saved.

  Until support chimes in and absolves you from this,

  and leads with that enthusiasm of the paid

  but not-quite-secure in the position,

  and initiates the standard steps of contrition.

  What version is it? What make? Has a cable

  been compromised? Have you practised in faith

  that first basic tenet of the restart?

  Conversation might linger here on the fact

  it’s summer somewhere not on your seaboard,

  that your concern has been routed so far away

  from its supposed place of known origin,

  it stands to reason any ground gained here

  will be more by fluke than by intention.

  What’s really wrong, though, is that you’re still

  hoping, maybe even caught yourself

  knocking three times on the countertop

  for the device to c’mon and just do what is honest:

  cough up the stolen or the disappeared.

  That you’ve been angered, or halted,

  spoke with a trace sample of condescension

  or slandered the company name—funny, perhaps,

  how the smallest matter had within it a largeness

  that couldn’t be parcelled or packaged before

  you were sent back out into the evening with discounts.

  CENTAUR

  One thing and plus another one

  for good measure, thrown in,

  as if somebody, Zeus-faced,

  in a way it’s hard to stop

  imagining said, Just one more

  addendum or appendage

  until the lot spilled over into not

  quite the thing it was exactly.

  My GPS keeps getting closer.

  Its voice more the kind

  I’d just put on and listen to

  like those noise machines set to heartbeat

  or Summer Meadow. It’s been said

  that non-riding cultures saw the Minoans

  and imagined centaurs in their midst.

  Yesterday I double-took a GoPro

  that turned out to be a lock of hair

  and so I shook my looking in the breeze;

  I think it almost fell from me for good.

  Tonight, I meet you in a bar that’s no more

  than a hull of wood at sea somewhere,

  and it’s because we’re there, I think,

  that I’m really what I am, outside

  of all the books that remember.

  CLEARANCE SALES ARE ADULTHOOD

  —after Glyn Maxwell

  The most expensive thing is to live

  on clearance sales—that’s something no child

  would wholly understand, but to me

  it makes all the sense that pith could give.

  You don’t see it when you’re then

  and there. Not the shoddy quality,

  which is a calculation you can make,

  but the way a cleared thing will hang

  the mind on it, and thinking falls and settles

  where the dress was made—somewhere

  that’s just a word most days, placeholder

  to a fullness that you can’t fold up

  or crowd into a shipping tube, or when the cardigan,

  like a little bit of storm come loose,

  hangs by the IV drip and the patient has

  the fortune and the means but won’t get better.

  It’s just another kind of reading is a way

  I haven’t quite explained it. So we put our backs

  to this and pass the store, and what it stands for

  is a kiddie pool that deflates.

  This is a place where happiness will moth-wing

  in for moments, and morning comes

  so fast I’m still waiting for a long-passed one.

  Adulthood isn’t near. I thought I’d wake up one day

  and say yes, I’m in it, if “it” is what they

  all were saying would unfold. But no,

  it’s a thread I pulled once absent-

  mindedly unravelling everything here.

  SWIMMER

  —after the Canadarm

  Deft space-appendage animating the blankest medium,

  picking through a serfage of solar arrays

  and repurposing

  what’s slipped from use. Like slo-mo replays of those

  shortstops who nab infield hits it clasps

  a payload

  to its weight. And it goes on repairing what it is, which is

  a blinking in the blank, a swimming of a thing

  in briefness.

  Would that it dipped an effector-tip into Earth-blue

  whipped up a supercell and sent it through

  azure Bahamas

  or northwards where it was thought it couldn’t go

  and kept it spun and glowing like new glass

  or a jettisoned thruster.

  Might it Travis-pick the nimbus strands like an avid fan

  of John Fahey or dabble in stocks like

  the invisible hand

  that steadies everything we can’t see that cusps us.

  In this ubiquitous lack of air, all’s clipped to what

  is possible

  more loosely. And this arm can seem to stand in for the arms

  of everyone who ever reached for anything:

  Hominin

  on a Saharan plain blinking through branches or a kid in Dali

  using all degrees of freedom to sweep for

  an x-drone

  under a bed. And, then, just as easily, it stands for no one.

  It can press and curl the equivalent of a city bus

  and swivel

  like a boom shot on
a second take. On Earth, though,

  it can’t even lift its own

  weight.

  SPACETIME

  As in the flour-and-water concoction

  Polish migrants used to make while

  they were given refuge in Uganda in ’42.

  You’d take the flash powder at the centre

  of your life and stretch it out until

  it seemed to defy physics.

  That’s how people ate. But it must

  have also felt like you were spaghettifying, too,

  so when the Bunyoro army hacked a clearing

  from the elephant grass and served up borscht

  to the displanted, spacetime maybe settled.

  Spacetime—the thought that none of this is separate,

  and what you’ve got with a time and place

  is more or less a draft. Or, when you’re on a raft

  one puncture from the Aegean, the Caspian, or the Jordan

  it’s about how you can make a vessel

  built for thirty transport double that

  for sixty thousand extra euros.

  Sunsets are still beautiful out there.

  Minutes can stretch when you’re anywhere

  going back isn’t. Stepping onto the truck,

  the dinghy, the lorry, with patrol boats

  ever circling in the distance

  spacetime’s counting kilometres then

  by feeling how nauseous you are at the moment

  or how a north star is the last knowable

  thing but even that can loosen.

  When Hashem was hiding in the bathroom of a train

  the French National Guard poked around

  in bags with the noses of their guns.

  Then they were gone. He spent some minutes

  that expanded outwards beyond a regular day,

  the way he almost seemed to be

  through the checkpoint, over the border,

  in a tenement apartment overlooking a courtyard

  in Stockholm through which people streamed.