Mean was published by Anansi ______ Available books at Chapters.ca Days Into Flatspin Mean ______ For more Poets

Ken Babstock Boot Mat (after Gericault’s Wreck of The Medusa) Never said Welcome but Leave it at the door. Panning through slush for gravel, it was two square feet of floating drama: marbled Kodiacs, their scarred steel-toes tucked under rad coils. The countable ribs of an emaciated galosh. Perishing woolen mitt, half on, half off; its sodden idiot-string trailing in the drink. A cold-blooded thing, it eked out a living in the sub-Arctic of the mudroom. We’d de-boot and set each out— winter’s weepy survivors— on this raft masted with the handles of shovels, rigged with frayed scarves, pass-me-down pullovers, and thrown on a meltwater swell. It was that way. What’s gone is art. Blessed galleon of the wood-stove, a brushed blip in the distance. Another Dim Boy Claps The first book you truly understood sent your days into flatspin. Indiscretions, indirection, applauding it all glumly, bending whatever soft metal those chicken arms could bend. Landing at Mirabel from Shannon you found the plateau a throng of jugglers, no one you knew answered their phone, Hell’s Kitchen shut with a whumpf, lifting litter into the traffic. Your thumb went up, a letterbox flag, and we sank back into the valley. Men drilled into cutaways in the roadside, planted charges and it rained granite over the rail line. Women acquired labs in German cities, their language bladed, distant as the pole- star. You shrugged off every option that wasn’t a long wait in a dim room Signal Hill England sent tap tap, and tap tap tap, and the hill answered back. There were cannons in bunkers, mines in the narrows, the Will to Power periscoping up in the harbour. Those battlements rust and whistle there still, but splashes of spray-paint lighten the gloom, and will for a while if we let the vandals roam, confettiing the concrete with condoms, trading in pills that alter their vista through the gun-slits of history. The vandals are young, and make use of the ruins. Stand back. Thank them for that. Fire Watch Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.” Repeat, don’t respond until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand, or was your silence intentional? Over. Northwest of The Seven Sisters, in a sort of bunker on stilts. Over. My first week I called in a cobra of smoke. I was packing my gear in a panic, when the next tower west confirmed it was only low cloud. Over. I get a crackling out of Alaska that sounds religious. Vladivostok. CBC. I’ve decided I like Paganini. Over. No, leave it, or throw it out, I won’t need it here. If ever. Over. When storms wander across the lower jaw of the coastal range, unloading their cargo here, it’s like being in the engine room of something metallic and massive. Over. My first grizzly passed within a stone’s throw, followed an hour later by the sucking thumps of a Parks chopper. Nothing since. Over. Days, I rearrange the stones shoaled up at the base of the uprights and struts. Nights, I stab at imagining anything lovely, but end up laughing. Over. The forest goes quiet as if waiting for me to finish. It listens hard to whatever isn’t itself. Makes me anxious. I think of how we ever came to . . . [inaudible] given the arms length I kept joy at. Over. Affection stung like a rasp drawn over [inaudible] Over. I thinned the world of it. Don’t live as I did. Allow for terms of relief. The black maples aligned along streets, waddling skunks, their dark dusters through the foxglove, your shoulder bag, shoes, and the faces of strangers; all may strike you as fibres of a tremendous sadness. Over. That’s you in among the weave of it, new. Over. Is that important? I’ve been contracted to watch this horizon and will be here until something happens. Over. Tell them it will. Over. Bottled Rabbit A dream: of a stand of pole birch straight ahead that drink into their moon-white trunks what little light there is, then pose in stark relief to the darkening beyond. The silence, though, is too complete, not right, nothing shifts, whistles or scuttles through the mess of undergrowth. The effect, not of waking in the midst “of dark woods, the right road lost” but the wringing of phantom hands, a poverty of words, as the mind tries to flush some authentic response to this charcoal study by Cezanne. When waking comes it’s to radio voices, a he and a she, on about slips, snares, the gutting shed and mason jars. It’s the CBC, in a town I didn’t catch near Gander, doing a segment, it seems, on the unusual folk dishes and dietary habits of the ever-colourful Newfoundlander. . . .bottled rabbit he’s saying today I’ll show you how to make bottled rabbit, or jarred rabbit, as it’s called in other parts. And as the host gives a slowed-down translation that imparts a tut-tut sound to all the t’s, I’m seeing that reticent, cardiganed man in the one act by Pinter hauling up tiny masts on a glassed-in schooner; only it’s a match-stick bunny now, and he’s trying to attach the whiskers. You can see I’ve already skinned, cleaned and quartered this one (the whiskers quiver, fall off, the ears lie back. The man sighs, lights up, starts in again) and normally one rabbit, quartered, ‘ll fit into each mason jar. It’s here the Pinter set fades, morphs, becomes my great-aunt’s kitchenette twenty years ago; the margarine-coloured curtains are closed, so the light takes on a clinical, formaldehyde glow, and two jars are taken down from a shelved row of preserved I-didn’t-know- whats. A lid twists, its wax and rubber seal breaks with a sucking sound, bits of white fatty pulp drop from the lip and she dunks two fingers and thumb through the film for the pink-brown, naked oblongs of meat. Perhaps we are what we remember we ate, but I’ve no memory, now, of what that rabbit tasted like, though I’m tempted to say it tasted like rabbit. The host, here, pipes in unbelievably with wow, it tastes like chicken . . . And thusly a nation is born, I thought, or something fuzzier that mea nt that, as I was still barely awake. But you were coming to, just then, as they descended into clangorous clean-up noises, his water audibly bubbling in the pan. I touched your forehead: What’s real? Our aloe plant teetered on its chopstick struts, leaned over its double crawling the bedcover. The word wore down, thinned to a film on the air in the ear. Morning ate its hinge. The 7-Eleven Formerly Known As Rx Back in the day, I was proud of my vast palette of candies: those for a penny over the front counter, for kids and grannies, and the more potent display locked in the back cabinet, only ever given away if you’d come with a note declaring you blocked, arthritic, headachy or just couldn’t say what was wrong for the frog in your throat. Now, I sell mouthfuls of salt to the stoned. It was snug in here, I was kept stocked and swept by a family of five from Lisbon. Now I’m grudgingly manned by tattooed kids in green tunics helping themselves to the porn. And the light in me’s a perpetual migraine, I’m a super- nova on a quiet corner, beacon to that fleet of 4Runners and Acuras disgorging their thunder of hip-hop and jungle. I haven’t slept since 1983. To make space for the flavoured coffee station and an ATM, they knocked out my east wall, expanded onto the ribbon of lawn— not at all what that Aussie meant when he defined “sprawl”. I used to dream in flamenco played on a push-button tape deck, or the gurgle of talk radio on a Saturday, but I’m lobotomized now, a drooler, listening to the Freon drone from the dairy and drinks cooler. Gone the licorice whips, manila envelopes, shampoo, shaving kits; I’m all Scratch’n Win, Vanity Fair, shellacked fruit, and the crinkling bladders of months-old chips. I squat in my numbness and stare, recording each night’s parade of freaks on hidden surveillance film. I’m hyper-aware. I’ve begun to loathe the intervals between guns when I have to convince myself I’m still here. Oh, Maria, shelving hockey cards while muttering lines by Pessoa; Papa’s spirals of suds greasing the glassfront; the boy out back whacking tennis balls off my brick hip as the day falls away. We stayed in the black but that wasn’t enough, nor was attaching Rx to the family name. Atlanta home office faxes directives re: New Promo, end aisle-ing my insides. They demand perfect rhyme: “I” ground down, cauterized, shelved in the back of “franchise.”