Issue 45.1

Latitude [An Unmade Picture]

by Mathew Weitman

The beginning of the film      made more elaborate 

by silence       [the way a sky is made 

more elaborate without clouds]       & white text 

on a dark screen:      an absurdly long number 

made longer & more absurd by its expression in words 

 

The letters change: To solve N/S, divide E/W by the time of day 



Coordinates code our time & place 

another example of unseen math 

[the filmmaker could’ve shown a saguaro but didn’t] 

 

Sightlines produce imaginary figures: the horizon’s subtrahend 

the empty chair      dead letter offices for corresponding stars 

 

My reading suggests the ocean too must have a meniscus 

as it fills & takes the shape of its container 



In an interview      the director denied familiarity with Cocteau 

when asked about the famous scene 

in which an osprey swallows a mirror & turns into an equation: 

More evidence of Ï€, that’s all 



The world shrugs off an endless sequence: 

seagulls carry spiral shells 

& drop them from great heights 

as they cannot pry them open with their beaks 

[a fact I learned only recently, from the film]



EXT. — DECIDUOUS WOODLAND — DAY 

The letters change: If each tree is an algebra, solve for X. 



Language codes the arithmetic of nature: 

I wander through the integer forest & often lose the weather 

 

A camera       like a flower       like an eye opens 

& closes      wants or denies       a location’s light

91ÊÓƵ the Author

Mathew Weitman’s poetry appears in 91ÊÓƵ Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry, and is a Pushcart nominee. He is currently pursuing his PhD in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, where he is an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow and poetry editor for Gulf Coast. He also teaches poetry at the Harris County Jail.