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.
