Ken Babstock Poems

That's not what we liked. It wasn't for us.
It was pinned to a stream. Ear-marked.
The arriviste mashed up with the avant-garde.
We didn't go for that. That wasn't us.

It wasn't quite right. Lacked focus.
Might have tickled the kids, the simple,
Or those others on that other coast,
but not us. It wasn't what we liked.

It was riding a riptide of research
from Pittsburgh. Big deal. Where
was the spit, the spark, the goatish
smell of the real? Who could tell air

from gas, music from dirge, dinghy
from ark amid all that saleable merch?
I'm saying we didn't like it.
And we didn't. How much? Not much.

We couldn't get in. There were no
knobs on its doors. Goes to show
some prefer building walls and floors
to keep us here, outside, looking in.

That's not what we liked and we disliked
when we did with some vigour. Active.
Off the couch and out with the X. Heave
to with No, No, No, and especially Not.

If there were a key here I'd make that ‘No'
bigger. Is it clear what wasn't on for us?
It's about cutting out rot. About rigour. About
the men in acumen and the small made

smaller. We didn't like it from the get go.
It was under the sheets as boys, now
it's everywhere and not. Not liking's like
affirming we're here while stretching here

to include whatever isn't. And we're right.
Show me something we didn't like and I'll
show you airtight. Excruciatingly tight.
It wasn't for us and won't be. Ever. Trust me.
...

We were more than a little sullen on the descent —
ticked, really, at the dead-calm state of the air
at the summit of Topsail. Like a row of penitents,
we'd hiked the hard-scrabble straight up, lugging beer

and a designer kite. It was blue and red and meant
to funnel gusts through its windsock frame. Far
from catching a mean updraft, it spent
the afternoon nose down in the crowberries and fir.

What monarch butterfly in Sumatra was so spent,
so drugged or lifeless it couldn't flap one ear-
shaped wing just once and cause a breeze, at least a dent
in the Wedgwood stillness we stood inside up there?

We coiled it and came down. And down on the crescent
of shale, four different kids tugged on the guide wire
of four different kites and hollered and bent
backwards at the strength of their flight. Composure

legged it back to the truck, we lit smokes and began to vent
into our chests. Colin moved first, sidling over near
a glib little pilot and flicking open a Leatherman blade. I went
with it, thumbing the grind-wheel of my Zippo under

the thin string nearest me. It left as if snipped. A parent
saw what his boy had lost and ran over full of hot air,
clutching tongs that pincer-gripped a heat-split wiener.
We shrugged and sniffed as the appendix of string burnt

to a cinder. We were up in the rarer atmosphere,
the social layer, where it often gets hard to breathe, and silent.
A new constellation just then visible over
Belle Isle, specks leaving, signs enacting what signs meant.
...

What's more unnerving, that the chevrons
scored into the flesh on the brow
constitute confusion, or that they point

(as they seem to want to do) to a spot
in back of the frontal lobe — a mappable locale —
that's truly, blackly stumped? Watch what

the hands do: while sketched on the scrim
between sleep and not, her thumbs as infant
bats snurl into the pack that clings

to the flesh of her rising breast. Her eyelids
want the field bisected, then want it magnified
or widened. We arrived one summer night

in the tobacco belt bearing bedrolls tied
with twine, bailer twine, and slept
in an anachronistic ditch. Morning

shaved haze off the immigrant labour
cattled on flatbeds that rumbled past
the quaintness of lettuce heads. In the barn

that was the principal clause our bunkhouse
sat appended to, bats in the thousands
hung, or scored the air in arcs, as

we lay in the loft in tarred pants not
wondering what it was like — We'd
irrigate the crop at night; I manned a valve

that had to be closed before a set of guns
were shifted west. He hammered on the feeder
pipe. He hammered on the feeder

pipe and I at the valve on the main
could not close the flow, nor could I signal
back. I couldn't signal back, nor stop

what it was I was called to stop. She comes
in wearing a summer halter top, two dogs
huff, lift, and shamble over to the face

she wears I recognize as tenderness.
There's nothing difficult in this. Intent forks
off from the main, we hit the sheets in sheets

of force that light the darkened rows. It was dark
where Roberto stood striking a wrench against
wet metal. He was from Oaxaca and wired

his wages home. The room's a lambent
blue. No longer signalling he missed his wife,
he'd point and name a thing: relámpago ‘lightning' relámpago . . .
...

Snug underground in the civic worm burrowing
west, I was headed to class when a cadet
in full combat dress got on my train.

But for a pompom sprucing up the beret,
his age, the fact he was alone, and here,
this boy could've been boarding amphibious

landing craft. I checked for guns, grew pious
of this spinning orb's hotter spots. He
was all camo, enactment-of-shrubbery, semblance

of flora in varying shades, hues, mottlements
of green. A helmet dangled on his back, a hillock
in spring, sprouting a version of verdant grasses

in plastic. I got past enjoying a civilian's recoil
from things military, brutal, conformist, and took
a peek at what my soldier was so engrossed in —

Thoreau's Walden — imagine him, rubbing oil
into a Sten gun's springed bolts, working through
his chances at a life away from men: berries

plumping in among their thorns, night's
curtain drawn across the window of the lake . . .
We must reconcile the contradictions as we

can, but their discord and their concord
introduce wild absurdities into our thinking
and speech. No sentence will hold the whole

truth, and the only way in which we can be just
is by giving ourselves the lie; speech is better
than silence; silence is better than speech; —

All things are in contact; every atom has
a sphere of repulsion; — Things are, and are
not, at the same time; — and the like. There are other

minds. Surfacing at St. George, I cupped my hands
and blew — bodies scattering among museums,
bank towers, campus rooms, and shops, each

to where they're thinking of or not, seemed
to prove a law we're locked into, demonstrable
with iron filings, magnets, and clean tabletop.

I can watch their faces go away. The singing's not
to record experience, but to build one viable
armature of feeling sustainable over time.

The stadium's lit, empty, and hash-marked
for measuring the forward push. On the surface
of the earth are us, who look in error, and only seem
...

Where I put my palm to the crushed
granite exterior, to the tooled wood
of the portico's columns

banded by afternoon sun, I
thought I could feel where rain
had earlier that day slickened, cooled

then warming, vanished. There'd been
an interlude of rain. The sun made
a cracking sound and resumed breathing.

Our coats opened. The hemmed
end of yours clawed a jar of preserves
from its place on a deli shelf. Red Sicily

expanding in a laminate sea. Where Prince
Arthur leaves the Main, sets and subsets
of visitors, kids, residents drew Venn

diagrams around buskers. I went
toward the gaunt, tinny sound of spoons,
fiddles, expecting farce or illness. About being

loved, and returning love, we'll say it heats
the surface in its passing, then becomes
surface, a tactile skin on the world

our eyes feel in photons, chiasmic
inversion of what's purportedly there. You
at the edge of the gathering watches

you at the gathering's edge. So it
would seem. Montreal; 3 p.m. in the strange
warmth, aren't we now hung on the rack

of the problem of some smaller ‘you'
happier left — or kept — alone? Tiny mote,
mote's opposite, unmeasured, entirely featureless


but for its property of denied emergence. The music
fell out of a cheap tape deck. Above that
a plaid-shirted marionette clogged away

in his scaled-down cabin. Fire flickered
from a wood stove made of two
thimbles. A rocker set in motion by the footfalls.

Art hung on the walls, and a view onto
green-blue woods where jays battled
the hours away; fire-ditch; spring melt —

I was warming to the show, when
the puppeteer removed his hands, stepped out
and clapped along. Then he left, and it went on.
...

Not poor, but adjacent to that, I lived
in an outer suburb, undistinguished but
for the mauve-blue mirrored panels of glass

alongside the feeder lanes. Not country
and no sort of city. Everyone drove, to all points
within the limits of nowhere; the rest

incarcerated on public transit: packed
in the high-wattage strip light
sat the poor, the mad, the adolescent

and license-suspended, the daylight
drunk, and Malton's newly arrived.
Hours-long treks through air-quality

alerts, fingering vials of hash oil and
transfers back. Or earlier, at the thin edge
of long dusks, the Bookmobile

dripping grease on clean tarmac
nudging the lower leaves of young maples,
I kissed a Jamaican boy with three

names, his loose jheri curls
looked wet and right, black helices
in the bay windows' blue glow.

And something inside me took root;
a thing mine that I didn't own, but cared
for, as I had for a pink-eyed rabbit,

loved without reason and was returned
nothing in kind, and so what? The flurry
of rose-brick façades being raised

on cul de sacs without sidewalks, outlets
and outlets, the sameness, and grimmer storeys
of the projects beyond the ballpark

were a weird history I was casting love
upon even as I wanted to leave it. I worked
retail, weekends, from within an awareness

of myself as Self; the brown carpeted tiers
of the library, ravine parties, parading
my young body through malls. The world's

hub, improbably, here, under untranslatable
verses of powerlines, kestrels
frozen above vast grassland of what used

to be farm. November like a tin sheet
blown up from the lake over Mimico, with
garbage and refuse I'd build

a hilltop to the moon over Mississauga —
chip bags, flattened foil wrappers, shopping
carts growing a fur of frost, the shocking

volume and echo of squat women's voices,
here from blasted South Balkan huts
via Budapest; Filipinos, Croatians

with income come to make good
and did, dressed us in suede pantsuits
at ten, or terry summer halters, confident

with adults, curious, clean. Damp
electrical storms, bloated purgings
of rain turning the avenues to linked lakes.

The low slung buses veering, Albion-bound
but stalled in a monoxide cloud
somewhere on the usual grid . . .

it was the world's hub.
If you feel otherwise, that it constituted negative
space, I can only say it's a postulate

without need of proof but for the love
I had for it. I knew before I could speak
of it — that great, horrible sprawl

folded under airport turbulence, advancing inland
each year, breeding signposts, arteries, housing —
it was life as it was lived. Raspberries. The smell of gas.
...

Late morning we arose and went;
West Gwillimbury,
Wooden Sticks, coats of arms carved
into the overpass,
Maples of Ballantrae, and box stores . . .

a barn wall tagged by the one boy pinned
to the peace on that farm,
an X-Box, culture
in bold colour bleeds into flea markets.
Everyone sweats and crawls north.

This will be our 13th
concession. Purple loosestrife let
loose through Nottawasaga.
New Nevada plates on a purple
Cutlass chewing the scenery.

Patterns are a ruse.
Our dashboard's dark, compartmentalized
life illuminated as the jaw's latch
drops. Little bulb, little bulb over wet naps
and manuals —
...

These boardwalk slats intermittently
visible where the sand, like an hourglass's
pinch, seeps between chinks, free-
handing straight lines that stop without fuss —

then fill again, as the wind wills it.
The beach path cuts through undulate
dune land where wild rose, marram grass
cover the scene like a pelt

of shifting greens, or rippled sea of bent
and tapered stalks. To step off
the path's to severely threaten
what a modest plaque declares ‘this fragile balance.' If

my affection's bending toward you seems
or feels ever just a blind, predetermined
consequence of random winds,
think of here: our land's end, streams

of ocean mist weighed down your curls,
spritzed your cheeks and lids, made both
our jeans sag and stick. The shore birds'
reasons blow through us too, but underneath

or way above our range of
understanding . . . even caring. I'll
pass this sight of you — soggy, in love
with me, bent to inspect and feel

the petals of something tiny, wild, nestled
among the roots and moss — over
the projector of my fluctuating self if ever
life's thin, rigid narrowness

requests my heart be small. You taught
and teach me things. Most alive when grit
makes seeing hard, scrapes the lens
through which what's fixed is seen to weaken.
...