I started dragging Cézanne
on Twitter—the bot posting
canvases, no discernible order—
about a year back, on his
birthday, which is my birthday,
making us each as earthy, as
stubborn, practical, not given
to extravagance, self-reliant,
detached, unfussed by material
goods, prone to morbidity,
patient to the point of inertia,
unmothered, emotionally
avoidant, driven to infer meaning
from context, overly fond
of a sardine and whites
from the sandy Languedoc,
anarcho-syndicalist by nature
though homebodies in the event
of actual rioting, affronted
by whiffs of the transcendental,
afraid of dentists, sexually
omnivorous, fiscally infantile,
unready to renounce
psychoanalysis in toto
while alternatives remain
limited to CBT night classes
and homework, disinclined
to afford the benefit of the doubt,
doubtful of benefit, slow to open,
open to indolence, solicitous
of others’ esteem in private,
private, piratical in the aesthetic
realm, domestically recursive,
allergic to church, interruptions,
and gambling, devoid
of long-term episodic memory
rendering sense of the self
chained to the present
tense, gun-shy, importunate
in pubs, hyperpareidolic,
ornery, saturnine, vengeful,
glum, and given to huffing
the turps as the other, being
capricorns. Though here’s
a thing, we’re on the cusp
of aquarius, Paul and me.
You know what that means.
Everything to play for! An open
concern in the late ’90s:
immediacy as a poetic practice
might be a reification
of the status quo, as in, hey,
friend, I can hold your compact
mirror while you touch up,
sing to you from behind your
ovoid reflection, if it’s all the same
to you? I have a screen grab
from spring showing Rocks at
Fontainebleau squeezed between
Roma’s De Rossi screaming
at Samp and Sontag’s diary
from 4/6/49 below:
“Nothing but humiliation and
degradation at the thought of
physical relations with a man.”
Why did you ever go near
the human form, Paul? I mean,
your bathers are atrocious,
atrocious in your eyes
even as you painted
their buttocks and lumpy torsos
as turnipy, waxen, over-leavened
pains de campagne, arranged
their intimacy to exclude
you, us, leaving them talking
and damp against the damp
grass and river rock
in cool evening shadow pinks.
They pass by periodically
along with Hortense, a few
black suits, men in a bar,
a boy in a loincloth, not one
of them fully convincing.
Perhaps you wanted release
from the mountain’s chronic
dissembling, the unfinished
trees and outcroppings
pounding their dumb note
of mass and relation. Perhaps
you were lonely and knew
of no working ameliorative.
Perhaps you were lonely
in the face of stone and bough.
Good, though, that a supportive
community has formed now,
so many subject-slices
you couldn’t have known
in the south, and Sontag again,
“Last night I said in my drugged
post-migraine sleep, ‘I hate
your mind.’” By which I believe
she meant the very weather
framing the horse chestnuts
west of Marseille was
the phasing of catastrophe
in and out of your filtering
front brain, set up en plein air
three-legged and fingertips
made of horsehair. Do we
find ourselves wanting to spit
the chewed pigment over our
hands again held over our
heads as the captured do? Crocus
midwinter the very cave wall
and canvas and standard
of a crushed comprehension—
another death after the farewell
to an idea of a charnel house
we live inside as sentry, nurse,
busker, and tenant. You
had me at tree but I’ve lost
me again, back in a tide pool
totting the money in a pinned
crab’s purse, the chest plate
folded back on the four or
six discs as the hydraulic
peel grab of six legs detached
from a jib leave their impress,
weaken, twitch, and let go.
Abject, a cancer would say.
Little fan-and-bubble drama.
Little expiration of walking
rock; the mountain never
returns whole from having
been worshipped to pieces.
Ken Babstock’s sixth collection will be published in 2020 by Coach House Books. He lives in Toronto with his son.