Ken Babstock
Materialist
Materialist
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.
