Babstock - Mean poems

MEAN

KEN BABSTOCK

Copyright 1999 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 1999 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

This edition published in 2006 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2X4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.anansi.ca

Distributed in Canada by
HarperCollins Canada Ltd.
1995 Markham Road
Scarborough, ON, MIB 5M8
Toll free tel. 1-800-387-0117

Distributed in the United States by
Publishers Group West
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Toll free tel. 1-800-788-3123

House of Anansi Press is committed to protecting our natural environment. As part of our efforts, this book is printed on Rolland Enviro paper: it contains 100% post-consumer recycled fibres, is acid-free, and is processed chlorine-free.

12 11 10 09 08 3 4 5 6 7

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Babstock, Ken, 1970
Mean

Poems.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88784-634-2
ISBN-IO: 0-88784-634-3

PS8553.A245M42 1999 C811.54 C98-933054-0
PR9199.3B285M42 1999

Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Typesetting: ECW Type & Art, Oakville

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

This first one is for David OMeara,
another pussycat from that bad town,
whose hand I felt upon my hand at
every word.

You cannot count on his face enduring.

He has retreated into savagery.

It is not easy to report this.
Don Coles

Dont say you dont know what I mean. Youve seen me there.
Andrew Motion

I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on in the hut by the granary. On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it back down again. J. M. Coetzee

And the trunk was carrying the severed head,
Gripping its hair like a lantern, letting it swing,
And the head looked up at us: Oh me! it cried.

He was himself and his lamp as he strode along,
Two in one and one in twoand how it can be,
Only he knows, who so ordains the thing.

Dante (trans. Robert Pinsky)

A goat-track, for hours, a gorse-edged trough
that fanned to a dusted bristle of heather.
We pitched our pegless tent on the crest
where it lifted, exhaled, a lung
on a ledge, ballooning in the winds
high whip we set the corners
with pocked stone, laughed at the thought
of it flung over the edge, blown
like a spore at the two lakes below. We hollowed
out a bowl between scrub pine and
must have struck then tossed every match
in a box before the meshed stook
of dried twigs caught, licked
out, looked over at the opposite face
where sheep like snow-patches slipped
and levelled from crevice to crack.
I heard the moan of fallen arches and
began bad-mouthing the long trek back. Perhaps
well stay, push on, higher, west where
the haze of cirrus fades to a passport
black, star-stamped and shut, not just
expat but exhuman; gone hairy, sure footed,
at home with our funk, reading the cairns
of warm dung like prayers before lunch.
I wanted to say something then, just mouth
the option but an old law hung like a beard
in my head. Still unsure: theoretical physics
or high-flown Yeats verse, the thrust
of it was how conditions may
shift from bad toward worse.

Beyond the sandbar, the sea
was ash-grim, a flint quilt
buckling. Houses huddled, slanting
on the bays rim like pastel mints on drab
green and granite. Paths
threaded the cragged bluffs
to a thumbnail of beach that was ours
for a summer. Wading through
shallows with driftwood
sticks, wed lift away shag carpets of kelp
and spot them there claws up,
scuttling black eye beads
like cloves looking back as they spidered
away from our toes.

Stacked up in tide pools,
in tangled leg locks, they were
brittle old men, grotesques thrown ashore by the sea.
For hours I gawked at plasticky joints,
spotted, knobbed claws, and
wispy ferns at the mouth, how the seas lens made
the shells swell, shimmer til
perspective was gone and their name
had washed up on my tongue Dungeness, Dungeness.
The boy I was edged closer to them,
brine-spattered, waterlogged, less.

I was behind the church, staking
bean vines when he sauntered up
with the gun. Fringed denim
cutoffs and Leafs-T, he lived

just down from my parish so wed
go for groundhogs when his father
allowed it. A bright boy, chatty,
Id laugh aloud at his stumblings

toward God: queries, crotchets as tart
and enticing as new blackberry clusters.
Wed reached the slough in Saars
south field, hawing at cattle whod

stare and moan. Chilled fingers meant dusk
was close and wed shot just the one; Id
bent over the burrow, a deep eye socket, kicked
the collar of dirt back into its hole, straightened,

turned, and saw that hed shouldered
and cocked the thing, stood fast with
a held wink. Had trained the barrel-hole
to a spot in my chest. I swear the sun

dimmed to crimson, a cloud-shadow like black
crepe cut the tussocks between us. His name
wouldnt come to my lips. I just dropped the
willow switch Id been topping buttercups with

and swallowed what spit I had left.

The revelry ended in a back
alley off Main. Past closing
and well cut, theyd shuffled us

out the rear door, slumped
and laughing.

We hadnt even
pointed our soggy heads homeward
when he was on us

all sinew and knuckle. I could hear
the chalky grind of his teeth
as he spat out curses and swore
he would kill. Shaved head, knotted
bull-neck, he tore out a
fistful of Daniels hair that plupped
in the gutter: a geeked rat
Then, clutching my head and chin,
stretched back his lips, tried
to bite off an ear,

and was gone

lost to everyone but himself, a shuttle
that had shrugged off NASA, content to
spin in the unflinching cold
of some further orbit.
Sobered, silent, we headed
home, nursing whatever hurt

and I remember seeing
it all in slow motion, or
choppy frames of still
life and thinking
hed gone about it all wrong.
Even as I looked down his throat,
feeling the scene lacked

any genuine fear, was soaked in a certain
pathos, that hed never perfectly embody
the assassin he dreamed of.

If you hate, stoke a pure hate
and no sidestepping.
If youre simply fucking, call it that,
it was taught you by your father.
If youre truly guarding a diamond
in your breast, compress those
threats to a murmur, cower
and peer inward. Lets settle this tonight
the stars are all around you