Ken Babstock
The World’s Hub
The World’s Hub
after Pier Paolo Pasolini
Not poor, but adjacent to that, I lived
in an outer suburb, undistinguished but
for the mauve-blue mirrored panels of glass
alongside the feeder lanes. Not country
and no sort of city. Everyone drove, to all points
within the limits of nowhere; the rest
incarcerated on public transit: packed
in the high-wattage strip light
sat the poor, the mad, the adolescent
and license-suspended, the daylight
drunk, and Malton’s newly arrived.
Hours-long treks through air-quality
alerts, fingering vials of hash oil and
transfers back. Or earlier, at the thin edge
of long dusks, the Bookmobile
dripping grease on clean tarmac
nudging the lower leaves of young maples,
I kissed a Jamaican boy with three
names, his loose jheri curls
looked wet and right, black helices
in the bay windows’ blue glow.
And something inside me took root;
a thing mine that I didn’t own, but cared
for, as I had for a pink-eyed rabbit,
loved without reason and was returned
nothing in kind, and so what? The flurry
of rose-brick façades being raised
on cul de sacs without sidewalks, outlets
and outlets, the sameness, and grimmer storeys
of the projects beyond the ballpark
were a weird history I was casting love
upon even as I wanted to leave it. I worked
retail, weekends, from within an awareness
of myself as Self; the brown carpeted tiers
of the library, ravine parties, parading
my young body through malls. The world’s
hub, improbably, here, under untranslatable
verses of powerlines, kestrels
frozen above vast grassland of what used
to be farm. November like a tin sheet
blown up from the lake over Mimico, with
garbage and refuse I’d build
a hilltop to the moon over Mississauga —
chip bags, flattened foil wrappers, shopping
carts growing a fur of frost, the shocking
volume and echo of squat women’s voices,
here from blasted South Balkan huts
via Budapest; Filipinos, Croatians
with income come to make good
and did, dressed us in suede pantsuits
at ten, or terry summer halters, confident
with adults, curious, clean. Damp
electrical storms, bloated purgings
of rain turning the avenues to linked lakes.
The low slung buses veering, Albion-bound
but stalled in a monoxide cloud
somewhere on the usual grid . . .
it was the world’s hub.
If you feel otherwise, that it constituted negative
space, I can only say it’s a postulate
without need of proof but for the love
I had for it. I knew before I could speak
of it — that great, horrible sprawl
folded under airport turbulence, advancing inland
each year, breeding signposts, arteries, housing —
it was life as it was lived. Raspberries. The smell of gas.
