Babstock - Airstream Land Yacht

Airstream Land Yacht

KEN BABSTOCK Copyright 2006 Ken Babstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published in 2006 by
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Babstock, Ken, 1970
Airstream land yacht / Ken Babstock. 11 10 09 08 07 2 3 4 5 6 LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Babstock, Ken, 1970
Airstream land yacht / Ken Babstock.

Poems.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88784-740-0
ISBN-10: 0-88784-740-4 I. Title. PS8553.A245A64 2006 C811.54 C2005-907390-X Library of Congress Control Number: 2006920155 Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Text design and typesetting: Ingrid Paulson We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). Printed and bound in Canada To Laura

Milk of input. Milk of matter. Honeyed epoch. Honey of all that seems to me to be But when our billy bees half empty, we can see straight through his head! The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is.

WALLACE STEVENS

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 couldve been boarding amphibious landing craft. I checked for guns, grew pious of this spinning orbs 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. We must reconcile the contradictions as wecan, but their discord and their concordintroduce wild absurdities into our thinkingand speech. We must reconcile the contradictions as wecan, but their discord and their concordintroduce wild absurdities into our thinkingand speech.

No sentence will hold the wholetruth, and the only way in which we can be justis by giving ourselves the lie; speech is betterthan silence; silence is better than speech;All things are in contact; every atom hasa sphere of repulsion;Things are, and arenot, at the same time;and the like. There are other minds. Surfacing at St. George, I cupped my hands and blewbodies scattering among museums, bank towers, campus rooms, and shops, each to where theyre thinking of or not, seemed to prove a law were locked into, demonstrable with iron filings, magnets, and clean tabletop. I can watch their faces go away. The singings not to record experience, but to build one viable armature of feeling sustainable over time. The stadiums 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.

Evidence of a wolf packs passing marred the otherwise clean snow basin of the parks Barron Canyon: their in-line one-two-ones a juddering paragraph of morse Theyll run a deer down this whitened concourse, surround and pin it to a cliff face, or let its own weight send it through thin ice. I, or the vodka, stood recalling Mr. Marysak explaining in Geography, rocks rust-red tint as proof of iron-rich seams when the pinned-up cowl or hood of stars didnt collapse exactly but popped or blew a stitch; a familiar seepage in weak-lit jades deepened, altered course to crimson, and fell in successive tides from directly overhead till that night entire became a darkroom developing its notion of a thing outside the visible: pure in deed, and fed. 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, wed 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 couldnt 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.

Happiness, happiness, happiness. Happiness. Happiness.

Sound of rabbits freed from the hutch, ass upping their way toward the Interstate. Etymology of blizzard unknown. I repeated that for weeks when conversations stalled, dried up, exposed the embarrassed cracks, or Id stopped listening. But sure as shit one among us would get it in her head to thieve a cache of civic pride that wasnt ours, then stain the river with it, and wed be up and out, hailing the Jumbotron wed nailed our eyelids to... ah, Big Face. Speak when spoken to.

It glowed a gory orange at times, the river, like the bands of a milk snake, and just thinking of kibble made mid-sized dogs recall that reek of acetate. They thought of kibble a lot, back then, the dogs. Crest and trough and the distance between crests over a given time span.

Having just watched my dogs suffer their bordatella winding, having just flashed back to my own spiking, as a girl, against rubella, I was serving him Nutella on dinky bread, this guy, whose ex once serenadedand beautifully, apparentlya harbour seal with Ella Fitzgerald songs from a kayak, proffering up strips of fat-striped mortadella and pitted cherries. And from within the darkened crescent my patio umbrella made, I wondered who and why this fella might up and tell a girl, a girl already suffering from, like, langoscia del hora dellaposta due to debt racked up with Visa, the library, and a man who resembles Danny Aiello, a thing so intimate as to make her Cosa Bella itch. And so soon! So soon after the portobello mushrooms had come off the grill a little darker, crispier than is my usual, ah, preference.Next page