by Jeff Latosik
but it’s very hard to follow meltwater.
The connectome could only duplicate me
to a pulse that could live on its own energy, forever.
Thank you, he said to me one night
after all those eternities that turned out to be years.
We were under a sky so punctured, it was bright.
I was looking upwards at my being gone.
THE SURFACE FUSS
—for Natalia Molchanova
The “surface fuss” is a term Molchanova created in her practising a technique used in extreme sports called attention deconcentration, where an athlete’s attention is paid to peripheral and seemingly mundane body functions in order to endure repetitive or dangerous activities. Molchanova, who went missing during a recreational free dive in 2012, is considered to be the greatest free diver in history.
The surface fuss was everyone that stared
into Balearic blue waiting for her to resurface.
She hadn’t really gone that far this time,
just another solo tryst without a spotter.
It was the stopwatch ticking and the oxygen
in the holding tanks, a simple hell for the marine life
she emulated in her monofin. It was the lanyard
she unclipped to move out of the light.
Hammerheads circled above her in the summer,
but at a hundred and fifty feet the surface fuss
was them, too. She was known to loiter
just below the average depth of the English Channel—
so the surface fuss was also channels, rivers,
inlets, and their levees and dams.
It was the Russian Property Developer
who was paying her for lessons.
Certainly his super yacht, which had a small raft
that they’d taken two miles out to clock times.
It was his shoreside home in Ibiza.
It was patrol boats and the entire Spanish Coastguard.
In two days, it would be a robot coldly looking
for her human form. It was dream stuff.
Capote, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman
said: It’s as if Perry and I grew up in the same house.
And one day he stood up and went out the back door
and I went out the front. There was no place, perhaps,
the surface fuss wasn’t—everything
that held us to the true like a metal column to its weld
when it had no reason to. It must have been
that she could shake the surface fuss off better
down where it was only breathing, heat,
and one’s wriggling not to become another sunken thing.
It was pure luck that buffered me that day
I went under in a tiny lake in Wiarton, Ontario,
when a current pulled at me
like a loneliness lived down there.
Coming up, I remember saying to the sky, Don’t go.
I have a tag that shows I dove the deepest anyone’s dove.
Have some air waiting there for me. The surface fuss
was why I should have come up when she didn’t.
I did, breathing air and water for a minute
or an hour while my mother and somebody else’s mother
were swimming out to me, though it was tough
to tell one from the other.
ON FINDING A DISCARDED BLIND CORD WEIGHT ON THE STREET
I know now it was a blind cord weight somebody had tossed
but back then it might as well have been plutonium.
The steel bar clunked out of its casing.
An unmarked currency—not meaning, yet,
because we hadn’t done anything with it.
Someone said it could be priceless. So in my head
I started buying all the things I didn’t really want.
Someone used it as a dowsing rod unsure
of what to find under the fertile townhome lawns.
Tempted now to frame it as the I in its hard opaqueness
there on the curbside looking like trouble.
Every now and then I still pick it up and it still is.
Always out of its element, reflecting light in ways
that make you squint, it’s a minus sign subtracting details
from the mix until all that’s left is this one detail,
this nadir that I’ve never been further from
as when I’m holding right in front of me.
It’s always colder than I’d remembered,
always just a little smaller than I minded.
So very small. There’s still time.
THE ADJUNCT
Forever in the far row searching for the Wi-Fi.
First let go at the hint of a bust.
Where the jobs flaked and blew away
leaving the truer or the ones said to be true.
That tomorrow’s okay but the one after that sort of trembles, leaf-like.
The contract zone. Where enrolment fills in
and the quarterly finds its profits.
In the factories that smell like scorched honey.
Dropping through the trap door of test scores.
The extras who will have to clean the stupid party up.
Shuttled in a friend’s ride or labyrinth of connections
beside the bruised farmland and industrial parks
the adjunct’s always sat beside.
The geniuses of politeness who are never late.
Flinging some filament anyone living will recognize and say, Yep,
been there.
I’ve been flush and been so far from square I once lied
when exchanging insurance information.
Maybe our dreams are just these hot potatoes
we keep passing on. I know because there are no hit songs about it.
So was I not enough or too much of something?
Was I ever going to be the one who couldn’t handle
his drunk? You can worry about where it is you’ve gone.
You can pop your gum, expanding and contracting
as if time is passing quickly somewhere. From the bleachers
of this evening’s air even losing the way is adjunct.
OSGOOD-SCHLATTER
Little bump beneath my knee
I run a finger over and remember you
once making ice flakes with your hockey stops
in Nathan Phillips Square. Then you
were suddenly horizontal in the air, crashing
down like all the time until this moment.
My leg was what was there between you
and the Earth. Now you’re gone and this injury’s
just some evidence you were, I guess;
fascicled with memories of you picking up
my sister with your hair newly frosted—
the kind of change that never quite
inspired confidence. Then you became so thin
it was as if you fled yourself and left a consultant to explain.
Now rain is adding visibly to puddles
which, despite the din, don’t become seas
though it seems they might. The gravel trucks forever go.
And, yes, sometimes when I’m just reaching
for the Hellmann’s there are seconds
where I still think you’re knee-deep
at the shorelines of Key Largo.
You liked it there, far away.
I see you with a cocktail umbrella
held up to the sun and know halfway
to anything’s akin to being in some kind
of trouble. So I go over it again, this little lump
of once-active ache. Come to think,
it’s more like a second Adam’s apple.
It’s not that I have something to say.
It’s that an ailment made a voice.
AKASHA
—after Alice Coltrane
Turiyasangitananda was
her name.
In ’82 she recorded Turiya Sings
in Malibu, an album I can’t do without.
John had gone by then. But in Akasha,
all his days were filed and stacked
in a cabinet where the loved are kept.
Turiyasangitananda was her name.
There is tuning in the timpani
of upstairs tenants, a quantizing in the coral,
those little riffs flung through the rocks.
She knows this, and when she plays
it seems even a doorjamb shimmers
and when she doesn’t, even sitting still,
it still seems somehow as if she is.
She went a way no one followed well.
Turiyasangitananda was her name.
Turiya Sings is now only a digital rip,
a cassette that’s up and gone to heaven
with its never-ending streams.
The filing cabinet of the universe is too deep now.
You’d need another universe to open it.
But there is another. The stars all
string the darkness as they flee from us,
but the stars don’t play like her.
PACK
One night five hornets alit at my window,
white but dipped in black, or black but dipped
in white. One got in through the screen,
and then it got into the ceiling lamp
through some slit or break I didn’t know was there.
Picture me with a spatula thinking: I’ve got to get this over with.
I’d take some steps toward the soft
energy-saving glow, and then as if a live wire
had come loose, the trapped charge
sent me flailing back. Back and forth, like that,
the flame sound flickering while I’m sitting here—
three years on, wondering what they were doing
five hornets just flying, probably not in a V,
but together. It’s like that flicker
was a living asterisk. There’s a memory
that’s set its almost fever-inducing sac in me:
a kid who stepped on one of those hives they build
on dunes and then got full-on swarmed,
stung so many times his mother, a nurse,
just stopped pulling out the stingers and said, Rest.
But the blur of him flailing in the nameless
river some period of my life backed onto hasn’t left.
An addition: some googling doesn’t give me much
to work with. The European Hornet, for instance,
has been known to hunt at night.
Some wasps are defined as solitary, and, in fact,
a hornet is a wasp but to detect the difference
you need a magnifying glass. All this useful
in its way. I can hear that buzz
in the lamp, which had the curvature
scientists have since concluded the universe
doesn’t. Stuck in there, the socket’s buzzing
held the hornet’s with its own until it became one buzz.
I know I got it. Which is to say I know I did
what was needed, as it is needed.
The thing is, this back-and-forthing leaves
something in the soft lamp of my life:
I’m old, so fast, the hornet’s still there, buzzing.
The people who’ve been sitting around me have taken
their break. There’s laughter somewhere.
Some part of me comes loose and floats
up to the ceiling and I see the beautiful legs
wriggling, flailing, lifting. The way rain moves,
how my mother used to wave to me, those nights,
in the cold when I was finished karate
and needed to be picked up. Then I’m picked up
and carried over none of the places I know.
4.
PHONE BOOTH MAN
—Credit for actor Michael Pecina in Out for Justice
Hard to know exactly when he started training at our gym.
It was as if we held up a UV light and he walked out
of the ambient hues from a darkness
that we didn’t know was there
and couldn’t find if we wanted.
He was memorable for his odd introduction.
“I was Aikidoed into a phone booth by Steven Seagal
on the set of the movie Out for Justice.
And when somebody finally opened it
twenty years had passed, and here I am.”
I’d hold pads for him. No pop to his punches.
No torque on his kicks. I had to fake the force
of his ad hoc Muay Thai. He had a general look of farm strength,
but something was not quite firing its cylinder.
There was something wrong at the centre.
One day, he approached me. I saw that wrist lock.
That’s Aikido type stuff? He was panting.
Sweat stains were living shadows on him.
I learned some in college, I told him
while unwrapping my hands.
When I sparred with Phone Booth Man I felt myself
suddenly dodging and feinting, tooling him up
as if he’d suddenly been slowed down on tape in front of me
and I could pick out smaller slices of time.
I told him: Stay down.
Months passed. Then one day he told me
Jimmy’s Corner was putting a plaque up in his honour.
He said there’d be a government donation and Seagal
would even make an appearance. So I went. The owner joked
that Phone Booth Man could now make all the collect calls he wanted.
But Seagal was recording a fusion rock album in Milan.
The local reporter hit on a waitress. A waiter spoke
about his surprise when Phone Booth Man
finally exited. “I assumed it was a dummy
the production company left. It was a person…”
Ah, Phone Booth Man was training for Seagal,
I remember thinking. I watched his odd and stammering acceptance
of a novelty cheque. Then people asked him
what it was like in there all that time while he sat
by the jukebox blaring rock ballads.
Now more years passed. A ligament tear straight ensnared me.
One semi-professional fight to my name,
to a scrambler simply named Lights Out.
There were screws in my proximal phalange
as if I’d been wedded to a big factory that only made gears.
Phone Booth Man called me. We met at the place
we met at staring into the options.
“People ask me about that lost time, and the only way
to explain it is like when you lose track of a day
then look at your watch. Well think—years.”
He was aging fast. As if his body was paying interest
for what had gone down. Like he was spending
all of his hours on credit. “Look at this botched Botox
and these bad plugs. All that didn’t change much.
Look at the way my face seems to be saying
the good beer’s been wanted and it’s been drunk.”
He paused for what seemed like a Holocene of minutes.
“I want you to hip-toss me back into the booth.
I know you can do it because you did it before.
It needs to be strong—a good clean throw.
You think any of these jabronis can do it?
You think they know shit?” When he said that I felt
a pain in my knee spread upwards and downwards
in equal measure. There were blots in his eye
revolving like planets.
He waited while, in the restroom, I watched the skin
on my knuckles flap under the blow dry.
Li
ke one of those YouTube clips slowed down
of some KO that makes a person seem more water than flesh
more wave than particulate—
I opened and closed my hand. A feeling came
as if up from the darkness of a glove. Back outside
I sat while fried rice rained down and all the time
that had passed since I first met him in his cut-up T.
I squinted and my head was tilting suddenly.
I was actually seeing Phone Booth Man.
I DON’T WANT TO KILL IT, I JUST WANT IT TO LIVE
I’ve been trying to write “Those Winter Sundays”
for fifteen years. Robert Hayden was nearsighted
and grew up in Paradise Valley, Detroit
as if you just do. Banked fires have blazed for me
often when there’s no fire anywhere.
That’s one thing a poem can do.
Paul Farley’s “A Tunnel” is another one I’ve been
trying to get to for it seems half my life.
He once experienced a condition he coined
“falling up syndrome,” not trusting his feet
to stay on the ground. He was twenty-one then; I’ve stepped
onto his Brighton line for the one thousandth time.
Hayden died in 1980 and Farley lives in Lancashire.
If someone aimed a gun at either I’d likely jump
in the way. I guess that’s three things now.
Time is holding Hayden but some words can rip-
cord out a raft that navigates the numerous gone.
And it could be either one would say
you might not want to put this stock,
these years, a career that’s like that grape
that never got to be into poems. And I would listen.
But, you know, nobody that’s really here—
all the many wrong ways of doing things
have always made a place for me.
ON THE GENERAL BEING OF LOSTNESS
Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star