Ken Babstock

Three Poems

By Torchlight Through A Ventilation Brick


And do you then see how exploding transformers
express an irregular division of what sky
is still visible? And then, at the blue-white spectrum
end, do you see the lampblack
on metal, shadow on hinge and plate,
the vestigial print of unseen power?

1348 saw an island’s inhabitants
reduced by half their number. It would appear
the earth took back every other soul that stood.
Just clawed them back and left a stench.
First to see the folly of the forced march
was a horse of a soldier of the Grande Armée.

MIT saw an opportunity so took it, the computers
kick on, tasking away, ever-doubling,
gunning for the quantum state.
And we see how the shafts fall across lead,
striping the eternal crypts in a Rileyian metaphysic,
discrete and geometric, objects goofily decoupled,

presented axonometrically, smelling
of nasturtium and damp brick.
The lesser Sarah as long and as wide as
the re-discovered patriarch walled off in a wine cellar.
What family demands is rediscovery, or licence
to haunt, describing a semantic lever

the rest of us live poorly on. A supermodel saw
the distinctive forest green of the surface
structure’s entrance from her window’s window,
the glassine sparkle in piled aggregate, the slack
spring of the rat’s body, the divinity’s infinite
grudge, wet holly, the blood of cooked intake and sorrow.

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