Dreampad

by Jeff Latosik

  that the mall map linked to GPS.

  As if you’d stared into your nowhere

  like a sun and photoreceptors

  compensated with a point.

  Lostness is an immaculately well-dressed

  person or a room laid out like charcuterie.

  It’s a feeling someone loves you after

  a ten-minute talk. Oh yes, but lostness

  is loving someone too, knowing you would

  take the raft out farther if it meant

  a few more minutes. Sometimes,

  I want to tell my dog I’m the only one

  in the world who knows her whereabouts

  and that’s lostness but it’s lived in.

  It isn’t sadness. Lostness is the job I had

  In ’98 in a warehouse unpacking chic decor

  where I began to unravel and unmake

  the very things the company was selling.

  It was the boxes I moved forward

  on the shelves until they lined up well,

  pop choruses that played again for the beautiful

  and found. It’s almost gladness.

  It’s the walk I took one day trying to decide

  Should I live in Montreal? and thinking that I knew

  something that would make it plain.

  Lostness is the many rains of money

  that I once watched from an open window.

  It’s long been here. The semi-lunate carpal

  flowering in late-Cretaceous bones; where everything

  was going then never more unclear.

  It was the first prokaryote closing off its little O

  and all that it could be instead. But lostness is a steady wage.

  I remember when my grandfather would come home

  from the squats and thousand double-checks

  of electrical work and wash his hands:

  all the dirt moved in his laundry sink

  like garter snakes that turned up under stones,

  a living current so bearable in its lostness

  that I could know it, only, for a hundred years

  and still be happy. Lostness was the school

  I went to where leaving crumbs on rectangles of paper

  meant showing the someone would have to come.

  It was having your knapsack up on the table

  like a personal flotation device. It wouldn’t be wrong

  to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything,

  like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness

  that if you look deep into, you see a great

  balance beam that everything

  that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.

  DREAM OF DEE

  From the casement window that looked out

  over no particular sight, telephone lines

  laid out a staff on which a starling would alight

  like a one-beat rest, as if the wind, the branches

  and, hell, all of the grid’s wellspring, was frozen.

  But it came back—I knew because the weird raccoon

  would perform his evening stunt along that wire

  holding whatever power we had braided there.

  Once, I’d seen a pack scrimmaging through the lot’s

  untapped tabula rasa, some elsewhere shading

  to in-the-know, knot shook free of itself

  on some long-sunken dock. And once I had a dream

  of you where you went under clear blue water

  on a dock somewhere I’ve never been

  and so I grabbed your collar while your eyes fixed

  themselves in me, two worlds, the way a cure

  and its own illness must. And I carried you ashore

  to where in all this you just sprinted

  beyond the world with me in it.

  DRZYMALA’S WAGON

  Michael Drzymala is an early twentieth-century Polish folk hero known for exploiting a loophole in Prussian law that allowed him to live in a dwelling (a circus wagon) on land he owned in the province of Posen (Polish land that was considered a German territory). A policy set up by Otto von Bismarck meant to increase German land ownership (and drive out Poles) by making it difficult for Polish people to settle in this particular area, but Drzymala got around that by resourcefully occupying a moving dwelling (the wagon) on his land for years.

  Drzymala, come and pick me up

  on any so-called rehabilitated street

  in Parkdale or Cabbagetown

  riding that circus wagon you lived in for seven years

  defying Prussian law in Kaisertu.

  Take me around so I might see again

  the loft spaces that the Ubisofts

  will always have in the end, but often not the during,

  and perhaps not even when the end itself

  must pack up and go. Yes, I know,

  we have what’s ours and then it’s not

  what it was. A phone call or a door knock

  has a slight transmogrifying force.

  Or, for you, some officials fast approaching

  as if sent out from the meeting place

  of haze and horizon where an eye has a hard go

  and the sunlight snows itself right out.

  So I can’t help calling up the sight of you

  moving that wagon just a few feet every day

  to get around the ban to build a dwelling on your own land.

  You could turn and turn a life away.

  Here, the salons all slide a Chablis into your hand

  while you wait. Whatever we had,

  it was never what it was I think I’d want to bet.

  It was never wholly cordoned off from winters

  where it can feel that all living things

  are caught in someone’s birthday candle blow.

  That’s the no that’s ever sweeping in

  like a cold front we can’t see,

  but in your mobile pad we stand outside of it—

  or so inside it we are free. Around us

  flags go up and down on a through-line

  that stays hidden. I’d only hope that I could stay

  with you, flagless, in the fantasy that turns

  and turns toward the sorrow of the world.

  DEAR LISTENER

  Not reader, who had the page to confer

  with and worry in or turn forever.

  No, the one who sits, pupils rising up

  like beer bubbles thinking what is this

  exactly, happening in front of me,

  like hand-spinning or blacksmithery?

  Listener—who has the choice

  to cut and run but who stays, quiet,

  not quite with faith (but faith’s not the worst word for it)

  and finds a feedback-swaddled room

  inside this one in which another’s voice

  may play off opposites. As in this place

  we’ve wound up in together.

  Listener—a voice is calling out to you.

  As if you were the one who hid

  and wouldn’t come out like a meaning.

  Not because of what you feared

  but reasons that you have yet to say

  and will say yet. You were here

  is a way to start, should you ever have a listener.

  PLATYPUS

  Like a freeze burn or a standing chair

  it’s all the categories throwing up

  their hands into the air and saying, Fuck it.

  All the grade-four projects flock.

  Its mixed bag of not-too-classy tricks

  is all that doesn’t sit well with trophies,

  curfews and the vagaries of pluralizing nouns.

  There are those flags of algae that share

  more genes with humans than they do with flowers.

  They wave on shorelines like all the flags of countries

  that never got to be. And those objects out beyond Neptune

  that have
the stones to demote planets

  and then even begin the thankless task of adding more.

  Is it really just friends’ headshots

  and their bullet-point accomplishments that make me

  fall down again on should from is, no from not?

  No—Gutenberg took all the screwy things from old

  wine presses and then he never looked back.

  What it is is a crock. In ’68 Duane Allman

  jammed “Hey Jude” with Wilson Pickett

  who was reluctant at first but when they stepped outside

  the chorus, hey, there was Southern Rock.

  GUITARIST

  I spent years trying to be one.

  Failed tuning in to most of high school

  (and much beyond) because of it.

  Seems I spent a basement-year

  learning “Bensusan” by Michael Hedges,

  who skidded on a rain-slicked curve

  somewhere outside of San Francisco

  and died in 1997. A digression

  that sometimes makes me think

  it’s better not to follow tracks

  with such sharp turns and giveaways

  and giveouts that you can sense but never see

  when young, and even a scrap heap shades

  to a Wurlitzer. Problem, as ever,

  the propensity to noodle,

  though an added vice was the minor 7th

  that when construed in reverb

  shores up the shoegaze era in a squall.

  What was I doing with all those years?

  You can hear it in Bill Evans, too,

  who’s impressionism detonated in a breezy jazz

  that never failed to open a window

  even in winter and especially in rain

  and, playing solo, his hands would go walking

  out into Plainfield or Newark or wherever

  he happened to be playing that day,

  and might get an ice cream or abscond to a park

  or keep going out of this altogether

  and pick through the low cloud cover,

  keeping a time we’ll never know

  but will also have to live by.

  The whole big bazaar, which contains itself

  like a window carries with it sky and people,

  or as a chord contains the feeling

  we’re more seaward in our kitchens

  than we’d want to bet. The long progression gives out—

  but just slow enough to maybe think

  that we’re each separate, on our own notched tracks

  with end points that wait for us, just

  as the best songs seem to have been

  plucked from air. Though dusk falls

  and takes the colours back, and night

  hikes the rent on being ephemeral.

  All things go up in the lungbrain of stars

  mixing and unmaking. It seems like some

  invisible hand is ever modulating us

  and, thus, Hedges dropped his lowest string

  and thumbed it in his percussive fret-board

  trances to anchor the diamond shatter of notes

  and regain a centring force.

  A chord’s just a bit of the day put to use,

  whose making defines not an infinite plain

  but the field in which one might re-contact

  all that’s assumed to have returned to its state—

  now, I play the laundry drying rack’s 30-gauge

  on afternoons where nobody waits for

  either of us on an un-gated stretch of Bloor.

  I hang the clothes we both wear

  for the years we have left. There’s

  everything the brand has washed away from

  and all that’s branded by its wear,

  which is the sweater that only you’ve seen me in

  or in another case a cardigan, which given

  the right time and place, removes the chill

  without you breaking a sweat. Oh yes,

  I wanted to be something. Only happy

  after many years that I never was.

  THE JOEYS AT KANGAROO CREEK FARM

  They passed one on to me in a sanctuary

  in Lake Country, little schooner

  on a stream of hands. My arm, an instant valley

  as if the newly born expanded what was really there

  abruptly and so maybe really wasn’t,

  as in there, I mean. You were I think in Saint-Denis

  but could have moved back to Davis

  following those quantum paths

  I always just saw as a kind of bland Sudoku.

  And what would you name it? someone asked,

  and I knew no other living thing

  had been so named, so filled up with all the many sounds

  it wasn’t, and I liked the quiet so I

  just thought I’d name it the first thing that came:

  Shockmaster—after Fred Ottman’s scrambling

  in that so-awful-it’s-a-masterpiece of something

  clip from ’93; the unscripted flailing

  that sent his helmet rolling outwards

  across the prime Daytona studio

  like Pluto did and maybe Britain

  all slinking away from the same plaster-patched-together thing.

  And might as well add us there too,

  hell, it’s happy hour, which is maybe

  what the joeys do to anyone.

  A masterpiece of falling is what I would say

  it maybe was. The joey was a masterpiece

  of being pulled up from the reeds

  that grow just on the edges of not being

  and that I think we spend our lives somehow

  so tangled in. A thinking reed is what Simone

  de Beauvoir says we are. Of course including me

  who was still pulled up now so long ago

  it’s just a dream, so far gone it might as well

  have been in Delaware for all I knew.

  So after everything, there was nothing else

  I could think to do but pass it onwards.

  ONLY AN AVENUE

  To have known it then, to have chosen,

  hearing expressways shush above it,

  the sorting line of interstates and viaducts

  where the perseverance of water is managed.

  Good, clean city work, hours funnelling

  down the sluice and asphalt nodding

  off to a deep, unflinching sleep

  while each of us comes to something no matter

  how far down on the company ladder we lean.

  Turning onto it, its many signs of play

  and warning, its oaks, spruces, redwoods,

  perhaps lined equidistantly, and city life,

  at night a thousand cabins lit and moving

  closer to the speed of light than we would have guessed.

  And avenues, like rivers, keep continuing;

  they are rivers stilled and never leading

  to an ocean, water slowed down and wave-less.

  They go where they go as long as it’s possible.

  They are the work of all who came before

  this but are gone, so gone that it must

  be what peace means. It’s a nothing

  that can fold you in or unfold in you

  the handful of things you hold when free.

  And you don’t ruin it when you speak.

  And we don’t compromise it with position.

  To know that and go on down and through

  I’m not sure where, and say that, yes,

  I want to be. This one way, too.

  OATH OF AN UNAFFILIATED BOY SCOUT

  To know that no one and nothing is coming.

  To fall asleep outside in a light rain.

  To find peace streaming in through a far open window.

  To the hi-hat and kick in a storm, to the light show.

  To know a foreign place, like
New Jersey, by heart.

  To move always beside the river of daughters.

  To live well in the smallest cubic space.

  To never put out a lard fire with water.

  To be all right with nobody’s directions.

  To hold in place all the days we weren’t here.

  To know it will take many years but might not.

  To somebody’s nice point never being the last thought.

  To be there for God should God be there and doubt it.

  To shout it, sometimes—and others to still shout it.

  To under-read enough to have friends.

  To over-read enough to be moral.

  To know there’s no bedrock but still agree.

  To roam far while still holding someone’s hand.

  To live, for as long as you can, in the difficulty.

  THE GREAT ILLUSION

  We’re just sea slugs. More or less Silly Putty

  pulled across a hot mess of fold and bone.

  Have you seen a brain? It’s a labyrinth of looking.

  One minute, you’re in a tunnel of neuronal swag

  never cashing you out it seems, next you’re in

  the rarified air of thought. You could call it dream.

  I think of those contortionists scrunched up

  in the halved saw box that a magician wheels.

  There’s some flashy trick to being—some sleight

  of sheer anatomy the naked mind’s eye can’t reveal.

  Speaking of the fits that looking closer brings,

  in ’83, Benjamin Libet discovered that a person

  could feel they’re making a choice when they were not.

  A little dot that rolled around on a screen

  and someone pressed when they wished. That was it.

  Our inner lives were a great illusion. Twenty-eight years later,

  Alex Rosenberg wrote The Atheist’s Guide To Reality

  a book that followed science out into the parking lot

  and then got in the car. Our everyday sense of being

  evicted from the real and true for a few electric shivers.