Wetterhaus
On her seesaw, a kerchiefed
woman comes out
into dry air, clean light,
high swan-white strips,
while inside he waits for
the cat gut
to swell, for drizzle or
a downpour to gallop
over windbreak and field,
lowering cast
to the cloud pile, slugs
blooming on the cowpath
like fungus. Traps and
blades could up and rust.
From her separate door she’ll
re-emerge with
blue breaking through
grey. Another thin day,
another spell of keeping
her balsa-wood
twin in his unlit room
playing skunk or solitaire,
losing weight by not
drinking. Dry he could
be a manageable dream she
keeps in a hand-tooled
box. She, the law that
regulates his mood.
His language is incredibly dense, but there’s a curious meander that Babstock has in his diction, that somehow exactly gets to the point, such as in the poem “Dream of the Cerne Abbas Giant,” as the narrator writes on his reluctant son: “He // wanted, he said, to not be the age that he / in fact was, wanted / to no longer be // even the he that he was and couldn’t not be, / inexplicably snagged in the cross- / currents of now and here.” His language is precise, but capable of a lightness, of a dexterity, that refuses to be weighed down. There is a particular kind of precision that Babstock does brilliantly, managing the complexity of straightforward possibilities.
I remember attending a reading Babstock did at Concordia in November 2001, and being quite taken with how quietly and deeply articulate he was, answering questions posed to him by students and faculty alike. Whereas a part of me might wish Babstock wrote critical prose—a sequence of essays, for example, on writing and thinking (comparable, I would suspect, to essays by Don McKay or Robert Bringhurst)—one could argue that everything he might have included in such a volume is already there in his poems. As the closing of the poem “Die Zwitscher-Maschine” offers:
Which of us now
inhales the city
as though mock
orange were in bloom.
My burner, my
balaclava. What a
notion, honestly,
what a notion
