Verificationist Poem by Ken Babstock

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 . . .