Final – for publication in Germaine Koh Works. (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2005)

On Utility

Ken Babstock

A post, only just deserving the name,

grew up or appeared in the worn earth

of the quad’s footpath—

it asks what top-down planning’s worth.

Someone cuts out a coupon for Thanks, another

for Many Thanks. Another cuts out a coupon

for Thanks, another for Many

Thanks. Another cuts

out Many Thanks, pockets Thanks, then Many Thanks,

then stands in the room as it darkens

according to the light outside

we call Natural. It’s been programmed to behave.

Because the vast warehouse space in which their days

are spent—the poured cement, the cement

floor, the door

for lunch and the barred window casement—

now seems to move under the moving

grass of sales-lot tinsel,

or instead the tinsel’s

a lung’s cilia through which the currents of air

normally all but absent are visible,

or the qualities are visible, or the content

of air from ducts in motion become what we’re meant

to see here—

Am I Here?

I didn’t build the shelter but sat in it and looked,

looked out onto the passing phantasm of exchange.

Then I built a shelter but didn’t look, as

there were more discarded bottles than could easily be counted.

The bottles formed an ice floe. They formed a reservoir

and became the lake we

can no longer drink from.

Rain became steel; became little pellets of perfectly

round, Newtonian weather precipitating

giggles and a species of quiet

anguish. Was that too much?

They find their level.

Does anyone connect looking

anymore with beauty? While the tall ships moored in slots

transmit morse to the positioned storm

lights, a friend leaves his squat

and happens onto, or falls into—

while picking bottles—a web. A workbook. No, a web.

No, a workbook of white, and what white is there isn’t Blank

but put there as white, as work, as what

we do with hours

and ask to be paid.

He clipped out Thanks, pocketed Many Thanks. He picked

up photos, on a corner of the dragging phantasm, of no one

and returned them to no one by land mail, as record

of having been: I was Here—

You weren’t. It was a record of having been,

or of anguish. I no longer speak to him.

Water levels fell,

an obliterative cloud of Doings loomed. I mean, there was a threat,

but I’d attached, just beneath me, and for the duration, a name.

I’d attached my name

to a plate then attached the plate to me, where I

sat in the shelter, or lit kiosk, looking out.

It was a web; a white web spanning the cement struts

that prop up the overpass.

He slept there.

We were talking about the movement of air: billowing

white air, smoke translated from the thrashing

key strokes; a turnstile spins according

to the force of wind; smoke from the friction

of wooden dowels knitting

the unused threads together:

A patchwork version of future—

A blankness that isn’t vision—

After burying myself in boreal dirt, then digging that self out,

I carried a stone around wherever I went, though

a stone the size of my head, I found, wasn’t

my head. No loose threads showed. Or loose threads

showed we chose to ignore faced

with the heat of winter. What’s

here, now, for a time

was something else entirely.

Born in Newfoundland (Canada) in 1970, Ken Babstock is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, Mean and Days into Flatspin. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada, Ireland and the USA, and has been translated into Dutch and Serbo-Croatian. Babstock lives in Toronto and works as an editor, teacher, and freelance writer. His third collection will appear in Spring 2006 from Anansi Press.