by Jeff Latosik
One summer, I sat in a café and read that book and I knew
less than ever about what to do. Put simply,
I was heavily despairing beside a dog named Captain.
No need for a story or poem’s dense, remaindered weight;
no aching that a Celexa could not un-rain.
I had dreams of being wheeled out to a cliff and tipped
over out onto the for-some-reason-always-European peninsula.
Then the wheelchair was calmly pushed back.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know we’re all ultimately
playing cricket in the dark. Take anything—the sky at night;
those flies that show up under streetlights
in traceless swirls of coming and going, that swervy,
strained invertebrate flight that pings there like electrons
and is gone when you shine the brighter thing—
all the hinges in common sense break.
And Rosenberg’s next book turned out to be a novel.
I remember thinking this one day my father and I
were driving the MG that he made from parts.
We’d left a rose for my grandfather.
And a gravestone is the only place your name
will weigh a hundred pounds for more than an evening
I think I said. He was telling me about a time he thought
he saw Bono in a Home Hardware and then assumed
it was an impersonator, but really it was just somebody
walking around in really big sunglasses.
And Rosenberg’s next book turned out to be a novel.
Maybe all of what we thought was really in place
was just a lure that bobbled while we followed it.
Could it all boil down to such a slip
of judgment in the ouroboros true?
Later, we went over that one dip in the expressway
where it feels like you’re falling off the Earth.
Maybe we were. And this thought occurred,
just floated up into the reservoir I wasn’t:
It was meant to prove our wrongness
in a way that felt less microfossil,
but Rosenberg’s next book turned out to be a novel.
My brain kept me baffled but still buoyant
in that semi-light. Conscious life was a treading
in the condo-coral strewn oblivion.
It was hewn in that oblivion, too. What came up,
with luck, was a lifting bag in the brightness changing hue.
A thought was a craft I had in the night.
And then the night was what I had in lieu
of all the ways that it was possible to say.
TWO CELLS MADE ALL OF THIS
I’m sitting now outside of all I’ve said
and heading south on the I-90, which makes clear
the vast stretches of the way a life can go
and in this brand of dusk all seems power-washed
of time and place, and I’ve been watching both
the signs for deer and then, sometimes,
the ones that were seen all too well, muscled abruptly
out of car-shot and left to lie looking up
as if dumbstruck by some huge enormity
the sky keeps behind itself, like the “actual” sun.
The trees here are gathered like some poker hand
that always wins, and, then, as if between blinks,
a town that never had any business being
makes its business in the day and often in the dark.
I forgot to say I’m heading to the Dickinson
house and the many parking garages of Boston.
There’s a name now for what she suffered from
and had to lie down looking up as rooms would spin
above her in some terrible realization of her seeing’s flex.
Sometimes a complication’s good. She kept her work
in fascicles and each time a new edition condenses,
it seems a final take just rains itself right out,
a fact you can intuit in a time where there’s an
ultraviolet view to see what’s there when the sliver
of visible spectrum widens to an un-tuned forever.
It’s good at times to think of this, though good
to just be taken and so in this outer stretch I am—
in deep, that is. Some days there will be a clarifying
of the predicament. I know once all this was just
a drafty stretch of eon space on which the raftless
and the ad hoc sunk though one extra complication
granted me a kind of perch. And so I’m here.
I’m thirty-five for one more week on the interstate.
THE FLY
To say how I merged on it would be to say
how I got anywhere. Bottom line, I was
on a highway that sloped upwards out in front of me
for an ever that seemed up for grabs.
I stopped and bought my meals on credit
that was always given, and everything was wrapped
in cellophane and tasted like Knorr.
I heard the diners, making out a word or phrase
but mostly couldn’t. Oh, and the strangest part:
it seemed each mile I drove rewound the time
I’d put behind me like I was travelling backwards
into my life. Which meant that whatever exit taken
found me visiting a place I’d lived once for a moment
and all I’d known there aged but in reverse.
Funny, though, that even if big moments were apparent,
it mostly wasn’t watchable. Seems what happened
had been logged in some cache the world was keeping,
but so much was some minutes just obstinately there
coming up out of the darkness of the heating vents
or soaking your shins from the sprinkler heads of years.
Things went like this until I said, It’s not my life,
whatever’s here is the universe’s staging of a punishment,
and I called out to all the dwellers there but everything
I vocalized came out as if underwater.
Attempting to throw glasses and thus go poltergeist on the fracas
fell on deaf ears the world had long perfected.
Outside into the shared backyard, I was thinking
it was all really just the same now, no?—all alone
among lawns the corporation kept so green and glistening?
And I was thinking that when a fly landed on my wrist.
It polished all the stained glass of its wings and I could see
the mix of shell and hair it was, its eyes like two pebbles
now given flight and sight and its legs like twigs
now fused with sound. Then it was gone.
And I swear that when I looked up I could hear everything
around me thrumming, the cicadas and the crickets
and the hydro wires and then the neighbours clanging cutlery
talking of the storm that came, the strumming of a lone guitar,
somebody crying and then whispers I was following
through windows with a radio and the humming of a woman
in a rocking chair. And just like that night had fallen everywhere.
You’d think the sound would have died down but it didn’t.
DREAMPAD
Just wanted to let you know we are extremely pleased with the Dreampad.
We now call it the “magic pillow” and my son really likes listening to the music.
—Review of the Dreampad pillow
At night, I lay my head down on the slow
obliterating sound of hoof beats in the Ozarks.
The Chinook of my looking blows through many streets.
When I’m carried through country after country
to the tune of work, there is a disappearing
into keyboard taps and singular cash register riffs.
There’s a static on our shorelines that we might
turn up. My Dreampad emits life-music
that my body can conduct with its boutique
antennas cued. Might be that it’s above me.
But when I’m laying supine it just feels kind of lovely,
an IV to everything via one simple USB.
Let me be just. Let me be free. That there is a deep green
exploding outwards is enough. My dreampad is a buffering
of waking-ness, of wanting, and so it takes the suffering
I might be and stretches it again, again, into a synth note.
If justice means rebut me, then upend my life.
My best case would leave too many screwed.
If there’s a path to find my way back to that one sand dune
I think of as the realest place I’ve ever been
then please let me. One day I’ll go into the feed forever,
and there will never be a way to find the Earth again.
So each night before I sleep, I say, No matter me,
no matter you. I think there is a kind of rain
that can fall again, in the end but not finally,
because it’s never through. No matter me, no matter you.
Because there is another way beyond
the way it is, that it could still even be.
NOTES ON THE POEMS
I reference a poem called “Stargazing” by Glyn Maxwell in “Komatsu Floodlight.”
The epigraph used in “Sky Pool” is an interview quote taken from an article from the Verge called “London’s sky pool will let the super-rich swim through the air” by James Vincent.
The poem “A Mile From the Bay of Biscay On Tour With Oneohtrix Point Never” is entirely made up but does follow a plausible tour route Lopatin might have taken and includes some biographical detail gleaned from interviews, which are the make of his synthesizer and places he’s lived. All of the rest of the poem is fictional.
“Spacetime” adapts details from a Guardian article called “The Journey” by Patrick Kingsley.
The epigraph used in “The Bright Note” is taken from Douglas Coupland’s article “A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years” from the Globe and Mail.
“Growth” begins with a similar concept as does Glyn Maxwell’s poem “Thinking: Earth.”
The epigraph used in “Clear Giant” is transcribed from the Radiolab episode “Forget about Blame?”
The epigraph used in the final poem, “Dreampad,” is a customer review of the Dreampad pillow from the Dreampad Reviews website.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Poems from this collection appeared in New Poetry, The Walrus, The Puritan, Poetry Magazine, and the 2016 edition of The Best Canadian Poetry. My deepest thanks to the editors of these publications.
Poems from this work appeared in a chapbook published by Anstruther Press called Helium Ear. My thanks to Jim Johnstone and Erica Smith as well as the Anstruther team.
Thanks to the wonderful team at M & S: The poetry board, Anita Chong, Kelly Joseph, and everyone else that contributed to design, layout, typesetting, and marketing of the book. Rachel Cooper created an incredible cover design. Deepest thanks to everyone.
Thanks to David Brock and Paul Vermeersch for being those readers you really need in order to straighten out, and then double down on, the strangeness a poem requires to have whatever liftoff it might achieve.
Thanks to numerous friends who have looked at drafts of my work.
Thanks of course to Kevin Connolly for his exquisite editorial eye.
And, as always, to Holly Kent. We have this joke that when I approach with a piece of paper, I also hum the music from Jaws. Whatever is here, though, is due as well to her willingness to be a reader in the late and early hours and to come along on this little skiff of a writing life. Blessed be the cruise ships, but I’ve stopped looking out at them.
