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,
