Dreampad

by Jeff Latosik

  SILVERADO

  I swear that when I die I will wake up there

  the vat my brain’s been boiling in, twelve again,

  plywood everything, a beige Berber carpet

  and the sound of pines shook by a wind.

  This would make it 1992; fires blaze on in Los Angeles

  and I won’t know where the cold war goes.

  My sister’s father is still alive in his creaking

  mid-life-crisis leather. He’s downstairs now

  and the two of them are singing soul songs.

  In this vision, I’ve been snagged by a thermometer,

  its rising red, and I must stay here

  away from school and the fields that are not fields now

  and the sky is deepening with contrails.

  There’s a story my grandfather told about

  waking up and seeing someone he’d never seen

  before standing at the foot of his bed

  but then he didn’t say what happened after.

  Who could? The rising red thins and tears;

  whole years unflex whatever pose somebody

  told them they needed to be holding.

  And I’m unclenched. But what I am now can’t

  be made real to whoever was once lying there.

  So I just run my fingers through the hair I had

  until whoever’s in the bed starts thinking of my sister’s father.

  THE 3D TOUR

  I move through houses one by one

  more first person shooter than the merely

  passing through. Domestic life gone totally Escher.

  Room by room in funhouse view,

  until you’re just back where you started

  but this time knowing a little bit less.

  There is a forest in Cordoba in the shape

  of a steel top guitar. I pick it up and strum

  a tune that spelunks through the steepest

  of Sierras. I’m not sure how to put it down.

  There is an island in a lake within an island

  and yes, once more, within a lake in Northern Canada.

  The natural world: you need an easement

  just to build, which isn’t exactly

  things getting easier.

  Up into the stratosphere, spinning through

  the great and slowly gentrified of galaxies,

  where all the event horizons slip down

  into their zip-nothings to the voice

  of Neil Degrasse Tyson.

  Every fantasy I ever had would sound alarms endlessly

  if I was there. Here’s a planet where the air

  might be enough for living things

  but it’s still too soon to call it. And then I get up

  and put my apron on and check for my wallet.

  THE FORTUNE YOU SEEK IS IN ANOTHER COOKIE

  —Fortune from an actual cookie

  Unless, of course, you seek no fortune,

  and in that case it’s here.

  Just as if you seek no meaning,

  you’ve come to the right place and if you do

  it’s in another poem, probably written by Kenneth Koch.

  What you think should be is often in another life, not this one,

  where the mail carrier sometimes pockets the odd letter.

  That kind of thievery just shouldn’t be—

  so plain it’s not fair to suggest otherwise,

  but I will because I like fence cutters.

  Lucretius thought the sun was the exact melon size it looked

  which was so of-his-time it wasn’t

  and seems to call back only textbooks,

  their broken spines flap-waving.

  I was waving to someone the other day I thought was you

  when you were actually in Fresno getting your doctorate in beetle sex.

  It was rated topbest school but you were never happy there

  and wondered why because look at all those beautiful rhododendrons.

  Once, you said, The life I seek’s not in the microscope I swivel before it.

  Life was standing on a windsurf board in Hatteras, South Carolina

  where I’m told the high beach houses willy skipper in the night.

  You think you’re about to ride a wave

  that somehow turns the water white

  as if blue was really the first right colour

  but in fact the wave that’s happening is just your own.

  Standing on the highway flagging down roadside assistance

  because the jack is in another trunk,

  the itinerary’s in another sense not even existent,

  and you really wanted to go to Georgia, anyways—

  and not as in peaches. Things go so fast sometimes they can’t be caught.

  Remember then when moving to label all the boxes well

  because sometimes what you’re looking for gets so lost

  it might as well be in somebody else’s house or life.

  Let’s say one night you were sorting through everything

  that made you realize you weren’t the person you had thought;

  somehow you’d sliced through the thin adhesive strip

  that separates each thing from where it should have stayed.

  Perhaps you’d walk through every room watching sunlight

  slow-tsunami the parquet with its lone blend of everything that is,

  plus a cleaving quiet. And you might come to rest on a view

  of somebody sitting on a stoop outside waiting for news

  of a friend who’s not now suddenly so far. Or even far-gone.

  LIFE IN THE PHOTOSTREAM

  There I am in Frankfurt holding a Jever

  in a side profile shot that calls up

  every family member and none.

  I don’t know where I thought

  I was going. Those years are a vapour

  and my photos all cascade in a stream

  and are stored in what I’m told is a cloud.

  What we try to keep becomes

  a kind of condensation, doesn’t it?

  There are the photos I took inside the house

  I was born in and something that hangs

  over it went on un-captured. Suggestions

  to rename it photo-storm or photo-cane

  haven’t quite stuck. Whoever I say it to

  can’t say it back. There’s a photo of friends

  waiting for rain to let up or somebody to enter;

  a kind of forced angle that’s stretched

  out someone whom I’ve lost touch with

  into a homunculus that’s all nose

  and fingers. It’s enough to make you think

  that what once took place is a sea you can’t fare.

  Here’s one from a plane window,

  the sky but from the other side—clouds set

  on a permanent pause so still and wide

  they seem to be a continental shelf.

  They define a possibility without revealing

  anything. There—that one of my grandfather

  singing that song he sang again and again

  beyond the point where he could tell us

  (and none of us had thought to ask him) what it was.

  AND MISSING STEPHANIE STEWART

  One morning she didn’t call in her report

  from the fire tower ten clicks outside of Hinton

  so her supervisor drove in and found

  a lone pot with its water boiled.

  Firewatcher, she could spot a plume of smoke

  in all the places that you couldn’t.

  It was quiltwork she took into darkness

  and, at seventy, improbably got by in ways that no one saw.

  That kind of seeing’s what we’re missing—

  and likely for good. The pillowcases, bed sheets,

  and Navajo blanket left behind are simple

  and yet massive as an un-ticked box of sky.

  The ca
sh reward remains unclaimed.

  Search teams traversed five thousand square kilometres

  rife with all those combustible kinds of spruce—

  angled through that precarious splendour

  a person must be careful not to watercolour in his head.

  Found nothing more than what they knew.

  There are many things to mess up in recounting

  what took place. The government, known to burn

  seedlings to spare the larger blaze,

  has since adopted safety measures

  including fences and two-way radios with panic buttons.

  In the place of everything we never saw

  that happened comes the world. It rolls

  in with a weather, is marked by a date,

  is one thing until it’s another or two things

  and there’s too much of you to see it.

  THE BRIGHT NOTE

  No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

  —Douglas Coupland

  It’s hard to step out of a dream. The world

  can be so boho, but it can also go all doorknobs

  on you. Those days the numerous gone

  still rise from us, like breath in cold.

  Only a small, wet gland truly gets that they’re not here;

  all the rest is very strictly on a need-to-know.

  There’s an elevator travelling down.

  No silver linings and no lemonade. For longer

  than we might have thought possible.

  It keeps passing the floors we thought

  all these stunt falls were breaking to. But it stops.

  The other day I was waiting in the documents office

  for a form that proved I was myself

  and above me a hurricane wheeled across an HD screen.

  I was thinking of my friend Sam sitting down

  in Volcanoes National Park and watching

  a pack of silverbacks process leafwork so thick

  that brushing it aside only made the pathway worse.

  To see the apes’ plush strength contemplating

  something deeper in the green than he could see

  was also to be rocked. And through the leaves that moved

  like taking yes and no and making them one nod,

  he saw the troop of guards carrying Kalashnikovs

  protecting all the life in the nearby vicinity.

  Sometimes it seems no stretch to wonder

  if the world one day may just yell Cut!

  And send the trillion key grips of reality scrambling;

  and spike the microphones in the grass

  so no one sings; and spin again the giant carousel

  I must step off to just see anything.

  Every now and then, I kick a rock to know

  I can’t live every day in the temperate zone

  around the temple that (it strikes me now)

  is maybe the best synonym for mind.

  Then they called out my number

  underneath the hurricane and I straightened up.

  I had no slips to prove who it was I was.

  Sometimes you’re really just hanging

  on an umbilical rope. I don’t know why

  the slack line tightens, but it does. I don’t know why

  a figure eight that holds you above emptiness

  is a clef for all the brightest notes.

  SCHOOL

  Everybody asked me what I already knew

  and that’s how I learned. I learned in books

  I gave right back or sold and didn’t even crack

  up when the joke went round like pepper spray

  in a far-off row. And even this was a test.

  School. It’s measuring something, no one

  can say what. The teachers do, but it changes.

  They park their cars or come in on a bus

  and make a fortress of a book or gape

  out of a window and then nod their heads.

  Jobs bend us in them and have a gravity

  from which only money escapes.

  We look down into phones as if from a tall building.

  They buzz on like we keep finding the edges

  of some invisible electric fence.

  The school used to be better or worse, we’re not quite sure,

  but we know it did change, and there isn’t a place

  that you can’t buy a coffee and our sports team

  is doing well at something that involves a mallet.

  It sprung up close to where I lived, so I went.

  Like many things, it used to be a factory. It made corn chips,

  so there’s corn chips everywhere, corn chips and coffee.

  It filled up with buildings, then we came. Classes filled

  and soon people were spilling out into halls.

  I spilled there, too. Then, I was standing outside of it.

  AND I LOOKED UP INTO THE BLUE AND GREEN OF NOBODY’S FIELDS

  What it’s like to be one of those common tricoloured bats

  that will slip in through any spare flap a house might have

  and make its slant way to the kitchen sink

  to free up liquidity and no doubt send the shutters

  flying open in whoever finds it first,

  a bit of dark going out on its own interests—

  is like stepping into one of those revolving doors you find

  in public spaces as if you’ve walked into the paddle wheel

  of a boat, but instead of taking you to Wachau Valley

  or rocky grandeur it just spits you back out

  again into the foyer of the Two Seasons

  as if just staying in one place required an engine.

  If I could be anything I’d be a ruminant grazing on

  a little bluestem in Tahoma holding down the grassway

  as if that, too, might up and disperse outwards

  to reveal so many roads there could

  never truly be a way. I’d be one who kicks up

  seed and prunes back the shrubs

  that would become invasive trees.

  If there is a divide between us and it can be crossed,

  then I will. If not, I’ll be here at whatever

  little hill I mistook for too much. At night

  sometimes the sky stays blue. And should you ever

  need me, I can carry you across a river.

  LETTER TO KYLE BOBBY DUNN

  MUERTE

  —Graffiti on 158 Sterling Rd.

  I wanted to say I’m listening again

  to your Fragments and Compositions

  and the one I’ve played a hundred times

  is “Tout Voyeurs.” I’ve counted the few tones it is

  so many times an endlessness has opened,

  and I’m wondering how a life in listening led to this:

  drone, ambient, minimal core. You hear of people

  wandering into a town they’d never

  turn toward while driving by

  and then one day up and living there.

  Not the pound and surf of metal I could have waded back to—

  four notes and just the space of having nothing there

  but any space a mind will fill, and still those tones

  can be the time you wake up half-cut in your dream.

  So I’m getting old and getting less,

  but you are young and did your stint in Brooklyn

  where some sceney publications even profiled you

  and there were living rooms and churches

  to unfold chairs in and find acoustics.

  Now when I pass the demoed building

  by the Nestle factory where I live, I picture you establishing

  your small settlement of pedals there—

  your songs could ivy up the trellises of windows,

  yawning and breathing dust, slowly turning on

  the lathes and b
lades that spun there once or the dishwashers

  and elevator shifts and thumps the building will become.

  I used to have this thought that one day

  I’d wake up in a different life, and all here was

  was an atomic flash. Some nightmare of a self:

  one long, unbearable sustain, a noise that funnelled up

  and fell on its own weight but couldn’t scatter.

  If you pare back any song to a constituent tune,

  what lingers when the counter-point

  and contra-puntal flicker back is a seemingness of presence.

  Like a soul, just what was there the whole time,

  really, and so it’s no stretch then to say it’s always been,

  a transparency or purity of being. Then, I’m suddenly seeing

  those glass rooms being stacked against the sky

  and how sometimes they all teeter like a game of Jenga.

  I was just this tumbling guy who went on through

  the many living rooms of the only-ever-really-rented.

  I just wanted to hold these things together: the beauty in your tones

  and then the wasteland that a being could one day become.

  Something still knocks around in me, I admit,

  an elevator lift of what used to be dread;

  not soul but where soul was once concocted.

  Surprising how long it stuck and hung to me,

  so just let me say it: there is no other life to wake up to.

  Did you hear of how they found a new species

  of hominin in a cave called Empire

  in the Malmani Dolomites? People slid down

  a narrow chute of stalactites and found the bones;

  Homo naledi, which in the Sotho language means “star.”

  They lived three million years ago, buried their dead,

  and by their bones we can detect a resonance,

  not MUERTE but the elbow room of the universe.

  3.

  I’VE BEEN BARON MUNCHAUSEN

  Whenever it’s clear I might be firing on some cylinders,

  doing another’s little jig of good job or all is well,