Dreampad

by Jeff Latosik

  I’ve also felt the end there ribboned in it like a muscle.

  Whenever I’ve seen the money I’ve spent and tried

  not spending I’ve been pelted with the thought

  of it travelling at the fastest speed we’ve measured.

  Whenever it rains days on me or it dries up

  and somebody’s beautiful commencement speech just will not end,

  I picture all that rain again and I can begin to smile.

  Whenever I’ve heard reality’s only just so there,

  the tracks don’t meet, a body’s mostly just a host,

  I lean back in my chair and a breeze enhances what I’m feeling.

  Whenever I see the ones who left me holding the hundred-dollar flowers,

  with their houses and their kids all flying by me single file

  I can see the storms unpacking like machines off in the distance.

  Whenever I’m braced against the quicksand or the ocean

  or the audit, ready to tae-bo alligators if it all defies my druthers,

  I can hold myself up with all the lifelines I no longer have

  and say, without any sadness, none of my dream homes wanted me.

  GROWTH

  The o in it lasts for the time in a blink

  but it’s tied off with a clean shovel tap

  of consonant as if something there might

  swallow up all time and sense. Growth.

  Fish blink off in a river that was once

  a lake that was once an ocean.

  They are slow fireworks for no holiday,

  more gone for being captured in a GIF.

  Meanwhile, my hand’s locked

  on Channel Everything so that I forget

  that it’s my index finger scrolling.

  My own hand’s the thing I’m battling.

  And so whatever lumps appear I disclose;

  whatever minute specs awake like animated

  full stops and float in grout I dutifully

  try to trap and kill. Twin currents—

  to grow and to stop growth

  and still the word seems to open up

  a space around which all manner

  of straight and crooked thing must be erected.

  I picture a river around which leaves

  have framed a view you might write home about

  but you don’t because that would letter out a state

  it’s put you in, a happiness.

  Lost so easily it’s as if it wasn’t owned,

  not growth but the moment before

  the saying. The city I used to live in has grown.

  In the ruined factories, there are weddings.

  It was all Ojibwa land once and before that,

  the slowest curtain of a glaciation.

  I have a daughter I don’t have

  with not a resolution but a blankness

  for a face or rather a face that changes.

  She doesn’t grow or I grow around her

  and she visits all the more.

  Peace is what I tell her blankness is.

  What she knows is what rearranges

  itself for a reason I can’t seem to guess.

  Growth. There’s something it’s all spinning

  on that can’t be said. Or if it can

  it will be right by accident the way Epicurus

  was about atoms swerving in the void—

  the quantum in a coconut shell.

  Down it drops or up life pokes its baleful

  tortoise head from it someone should say

  and if they haven’t then I’ll say it.

  Once, in Bangkok a tuk-tuk driver stopped in mid-day traffic

  and knew the locus points and fissures necessary

  to crack a coconut I’d purchased with one tap.

  He was gone before he’d heard my thanks.

  Inside, the water was so cold that I still

  think about it when I hold my finger

  under a faucet, feeling for a sensation

  I’m not sure I’d know I’ve got.

  And then in a cab on Peter St. the driver motioned

  to a screen on his back-seat headrest

  and I tapped my card like I was never

  even really there. Beyond that the only thing

  exchanged was pleasantries. Don’t worry,

  tech support will tether us back to all

  that can be billed if not leaned on well.

  But there’s forever an addendum here: error

  is the loam from which layoff, retraction, bust

  and frustration bloom. And us.

  CUBEWANO

  —Pronounced “Cube-wawn-oh,” a nickname for QB1, the first trans-Neptunian object discovered in the Kuiper belt

  When David Jewitt looked into his lens

  on Mauna Kea one night in 1992 he saw it—

  lone outlier, as if from a game

  that had been packed up and long won

  and what remained was just this lone Hail Mary

  that never really got squared.

  Not among the sleek and smooth-seeming

  entourages of moons and planets;

  unconcerned with the inside politics of orbit.

  It sped by in what we can’t now call

  only just the empty dark.

  I wonder if he saw the smashed abacus

  of light and blinked away a simple math.

  Maybe he asked if moving forward really just meant

  staying put to see what’s only ever been present

  in a kind of not-plain view. Last night I spent hours looking

  at the little needle moving on my screen

  predicting which way the vote or the weather would go.

  I thought: I never would have guessed

  I’d love someone who couldn’t fall apart

  in a FreshCo beside the many gluten-free cakes.

  And about ten years, I’d add, since I sat down

  and wrote my first what I would call

  (because I lived all that time that happened after) poem.

  THE NATURAL

  So Yaadi Tremen pitched half a season

  and was out with plantar fasciitis.

  It wasn’t fair but then there was the talent,

  which is what Dr. Rory Keane who performed

  the release procedure had in spades.

  He poked around the heel spur

  with its bird beak and its cresting wave

  and even managed to daydream himself

  carving a shorey break in Biarritz or Shonan.

  Meanwhile, Rory Keane Jr. (who couldn’t tell

  blade from whisk) was slowly accepting the idea

  that he wouldn’t be the governor of Maine

  much less the mayor of Newton,

  a bell curve of fence slats that, should he be stoned,

  expanded like the rib cage of a humpback

  as he drove home avoiding all lit roads.

  He’d say, You’d do the same but not to anyone,

  much less his father who lived his life

  in a percentile Rory Jr. thought of as a kind of summit.

  Hence, the trip to Mount Katahdin

  on which Thoreau stood atop in 1846

  wanting to see the soul of nature and then

  said, This was that Earth of which we have heard,

  made out of Chaos and Old Night.

  Quite exact, despite when you think of how

  a doctor can elongate a calf muscle

  quietly without breaking much of a sweat.

  Or how Tremen once threw 100 mph

  with a chest cold that had sapped him

  almost to the point where he would say

  the natural is too expensive.

  When we think of the place we’re meant to be,

  doesn’t it all seem to unfold so effortlessly?

  Which doesn’t get Rory Jr. coming back

  and thinking to himself that he’s avoided lit roads all
his life—

  and like that he’s skidding on some ice.

  When he recovers, it will go unseen,

  giving him the time to sit and stare into the darkness

  once again but this time think, A chimera almost killed me.

  POP ROCKS

  We had this game. You stood and shook them into your mouth.

  Then, Coke. Then pain.

  If we could, we counted, One, two.

  And then we spit when it was too much.

  You wouldn’t have known the city then.

  It had this narrow, empty horizon.

  The buildings now are architecturally twisted

  like they’re being half-nelsoned for cash.

  You did it again. Three, four. The circle grew

  and grew and took more in as we learned

  cell life started. Mack Johnson held it in for

  five minutes. Then he promptly, silently left.

  The city in exploded view. Cranes, more cranes,

  two bedrooms, three. Skyline almost fizzing

  like those long holds where the spit was blue.

  I have no deeper story to tell:

  There’s an opposite to singing.

  CLEAR GIANT

  Imagine you do something small….So if I forge a cheque…minor offence…and in the process of arresting and convicting me maybe the courts do a brain scan and they determine that actually she has a predilection for far more serious crimes….She hasn’t done any of those things yet she could commit a violent crime…if all you’re worried about is what she might do, then you can keep her in prison forever.

  —Nita Farahany and Jad Abumrad, “Forget about Blame?” episode, Radiolab

  Here—not prison. Not really the occupancy

  professionals state. Just a clear giant,

  an optical cloak of steel and glass keeping us.

  We live here, they say. We say it, too.

  Except some days we’re more, It really just is.

  So we do the things we would have done:

  water the hostas, mend a torn latch.

  And on evenings when our zone plays

  slow pitch long into dusk, then we field.

  We love one another until it’s too much

  and Jerry or Avi’s out sprinting again

  beyond the gate, reaching for the clear giant.

  How long has it been? I never wasn’t.

  A machine just glided over me like the angels in our books.

  Some nights they show a PSA. Once, an aerial shot

  of the brain could explain away a case or two.

  But when we dropped down to city level

  via fMRI and then GN3Q a tiny bit of fluff

  or damage became the devil in the details.

  What to do? Some nights I just sit and look

  at my hands. In some whirring vector machine,

  I’m dinging red, a cloud of killer I can’t diffuse.

  It’s not human to not see the walls, Avi says

  and sprints again. Or it is. Some nights I take my walks out

  as far as I can go without the thought of returning

  to my notches on a lone tree counting all of the years.

  A room with no chairs and a view of a town

  appears like a beacon whenever I close my eyes.

  THE REPLAY REVIEW

  It was a new challenge about the place

  one thing ended and another began.

  In the stands we watched and then

  rained tall cans down from the blue

  as if forever was just a vendor.

  It was about a line in the sand

  somebody had up and called blue ribbon.

  A supposed given that was more a command

  so there was a tribunal and then a long deliberation.

  There was a common conclusion once.

  Then a bunch of crummy pamphlets.

  It was a beaut in one kind of way.

  A territorial dispute of whether the fence-post

  was foul or fair in a deafening boo.

  It was everything peer-reviewed

  up in the air set to blaring country

  music and each citizen elbow-deep

  in their data plan and their to-dos.

  It was waiting. It was hard.

  It was discovering that our camera-flipped

  phones when turned to each other

  created a kind of infinity mirror

  making the whole scene more fun house

  than a place you’d ever want to keep score

  of anything true. It was a hunch that reality,

  never more tricky, kept moving quietly

  in and out of view as if stuck on one of those terrible

  hot dog carousels. It was being so lost

  in the inside baseball and the legalese

  we couldn’t tell the storms from the breeze

  and couldn’t freeze the bobbleheads

  some other team, and then our team,

  were becoming. Man, it was really bumming

  me out. I was in the nosebleeds

  wondering if I might just up and blow away.

  I was watching all of us hovering there.

  It was all hovering. A kind of slow flash

  and it moved like knees do when the jury,

  the crew chief, the judge, the worry of doctors

  and the sea of committees are taking their sweet time.

  It was arguing about that initial challenge

  or at what point the call had been made.

  No tape on that, though. All the times

  I gave up on the final one I came back less afraid.

  HIDDEN POCKETS IN PARKAS

  Sometimes I like to sit and slide

  my hand into one. The Sub Zero line can feel

  like an alpine summit in itself.

  The padding is called Thermaflex

  which is really eiderdown in the way

  that an impression of Christopher Walken

  is the man who once played Frank Abagnale.

  It’s no big glitch to just start losing track

  of what’s really apparent—

  but let’s say that the lightest twitch

  makes a tear in the warp and woof

  a salesman swore on his own brother

  was foolproof. And so suddenly I’m cut loose

  from the lining that was meant to shield me

  from whether I was really in the Eaton Centre.

  I wasn’t. I was walking through a field

  somewhere in Hindu Kush.

  I was kneading a tiny hit of hash

  and combing a helmet into my head.

  A sky chewed up by Chinook blade.

  My smartphone was rifle butt.

  And so many hidden pockets I couldn’t

  remember where I’d put the most identifying

  of my documents: a letter from my stepmother.

  THE GOOD

  Oh, floating good of just above eye level, of non-blinding rays,

  a bit taller still than anyone who bristles

  at attention for the anthem or the silence—

  let me remember the many Japanese women

  who filled their breasts with silicone to please American recruits.

  Many of them died, oh good of the high up in a tree

  with no branches for the first ten feet then boom

  it all comes flailing its arms for help.

  There’s an ever-shifting line we live by trying to walk

  holding all the mismatched things we’ve sworn are not.

  They won’t settle because we’re each other’s answers

  but we’re separate. Yesterday, an officer wouldn’t

  acknowledge my reports that someone by the slide

  was deep in trouble, and when I looked back, dear good

  of the hundred hatha poses on a single ankle,

  he became a tree himself, which is to say he left.

  Sometimes you run away or stay
too long,

  have to live the hundredth day wiping gravy from the platter.

  Sometimes you hang around kite level, unable to be pulled in

  well enough or winds will whip you higher

  than a human eye can see. Otherwise, you’re not unlike

  a favourite band touring Cleveland for one night

  but all the flights there are being diverted

  or delayed. I wish I knew you better

  on those days when it seems the leaves are just these bad

  magician hanky tricks. We have to postulate a fiction.

  I could follow what is real down to its furnaces.

  But I do see you out somewhere that Google Maps won’t

  guess the driving time to accurately. Somebody’s limbs

  are being switched off like lights in a room that’s being left.

  It’s almost empty now except the last light whose glare

  has now turned to soft candle glow at night. You’re there.

  THE CONNECTOME

  When they laid the neurolink down on me softly

  implanting the plugs of everything into

  my late stage of limbic thinning

  all knowledge moved through me as breath might move

  in a napper. Some smell to a crocus, true,

  but no crocuses seeming the slowest applause.

  No caring that they had an ache-smell

  that welled itself downwards, were more smell

  than anything. When they peeled the server farm

  off me as if it were clothes long drenched

  in a storm that had lain itself down,

  exhausted, I slept.

  This one shored up memory

  of Kyle Wallace in grade 3

  aiming his air rifle at me one Sunday

  and then whispering, Bang. I woke up to that.

  I reached out through eons of air

  and tried to fasten his childhood back on him

  like ice that had fallen

  from a high Artic shelf.

  I can know property, degree, and position,