Spotlight series #99 : Kemeny Babineau

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

As a child I was small, and understood a West African language. I grew out of one and forgot the other. There is more. We moved around a bit when the family returned to Canada. Schoolish and rural, teacher and librarian parents. Livestock in the barn, art on the walls. Cities and towns paved over top. I have been a lot of things and still am: father, partner, poet, bookseller, publisher, cook…. And always the student. Some previous publications are After the 6ix O’Clock News (BookThug), House of Many Words (Angel House Press), The Blackburn Files (above/ground) and Nurse Sing Home (above/ground).

Poetry strives for authenticity. To be authentic is to be inspired. Inspiration, that eureka moment, is devoid of ego. Ego destroys authenticity. When a poem is made in service of another thing, even if that thing is the self, it is no longer authentic. Inspiration is a search, a chase, but in the end it finds us. It finds us in books, in dreams. It finds us paying attention, sensitive, thrumming. And sudden as laughter it escapes the body.

The Death of Tecumseh
(from an Erasure of Charles Mair’s “Tecumseh: A Drama.”)

Near the wasted moon strange lights interpret the land.

“Wash my side. Tease my grave stretching to the sea.
Beware persuasion, and charms by night. Ho!
Perfidious purpose. A crab has more love.
Shelter the witness of falsehood.
Restore stumbled profusion. Tradition
Is the past being born. Break their clocks
Heave them out to sea. This is the end of northward.
Visit a deeper awe. Answer the earth
Break a people’s fate, purpose yourselves
Howl! My tongue flags. I perceive the night’s creeping.
Revenge is sick. It withers your heart.
Go into tomorrow’s sun. Abhor the sword.
Do not despair. Rejoice, Be skilful. Strike”

The Chicken Lost its Penis
(Ironically, the rooster, great symbol of masculinity, has no penis. Chickens, like many other birds, lost their penises at some point in evolutionary history.)

The cockerel lost its cock but remembers where it was kept. Invisible and inert it awaits the cloacal bump.

The chicken has lost its penis. It was last seen as a bookmark in a Henry Miller’s Crazy Cock. What will happen next?

The sky is falling and there isn’t a penis in sight. The rooster screams.

The chicken has lost its penis. It lay across the road like a traffic counting ribbon. Looking for its penis, the chicken crossed the road, wondering; is this some kind of joke?

The chicken lost its penis, but Sherlock Holmes and Mary Shelley found it, fell in love, and created humankind by passing the penis back and forth.

The chicken lost its penis, but it was found in Chesterfield Ontario. Alone on a hill a woman holds it high. It is dawn; the world is brilliant with colour. Nothing happens. Then it is night.

Somewhere, the cockless cockerel crows.

Birth Day Poem

Some of us make it thru, back to the water.
Running in the shallows, at first, easy for some.
The ocean deepens the further you go.
A yard for every year she said, and nobody floats.
Some fall too soon, the mind wanders, there is illness, accident.
At 50 yards the shoulders glisten, those behind have teeth like pearls.
Together we are separate, our bodies, golden and alone.
The fallen disappear, slip under, and are gone.
The water is clear and splashes brightly — even as the body slows.
Consumed, like a single ray of light in a universe of unutterable darkness.

April 16, 2016

This poem was composed on my drive into work on my birthday, April 16th, at dawn. The poem began to at once entwine and fray as I both expanded and revised it in my mind and attempted to preserve what I had originally composed. There were variations & versions, bits have been left behind, routes abandoned, and what has survived — been pulled into the now, now and again, is a version as well as a variation. Aren’t we all. Upon arriving at work I wrote most of what I could recall on a torn open box and shoved it in my locker. It was not further edited until the following May 2nd.