Matthew James Babcock Poems
The Journey
I wonder if The Age of the Journey has passed
in America now that The Port of Arlington
has become Earl Snell Memorial Park, and not
one hundred yards from rocky banks
where burly voyageurs and their Cayuse brides
upended canoes of fresh pelts, a toothless
Shell station attendant who’s a dead ringer
for Carmine Ragusa tops off my tank.
Travel means nothing in an era when every
destination is your living room. Will any
of us ever drink our urine on the run
from Modocs? Leave the train of Shutler wagons,
seventeen and barefoot, to strike out alone
through sagebrush with only a Winchester
and loaf of saleratus bread? The Tillamooks
had The Age of Myth, Age of Transformation,
and Age of True Happenings. We drift
in estuaries of interstate, squint into
unleaded sun. No matter how hard I dream,
every smokehouse ends up as the empty
building that was Happy Canyon Pizza. Every
yellow Union Pacific caboose chugs inches
and becomes a museum under the ecstatic
sneakers of my children. I think I could be wrong,
though, when a girl emerges from the unisex
rest room I am waiting to enter. Her hair
and snug pants are a tribute to the immortality
of Joan Jett. Her boyfriend has escaped
the history of hygiene to slouch against
the coffee dispenser. I am witness to the dawn
of an epoch of primal odysseys, as she ferries
through the exit, arms draped in plastic satchels
of peach cupcakes and jugs of green caffeine.
Only when she nears a rust-dappled Dodge Ram
with a shattered camper shell does he touch her.
He has explored the smooth geography
of her body a thousand times, but the hand
he brushes over the black scowl of a rose tattoo
on her shoulder blade is as gentle as the blush
of moonlight on virgin prairie, a gesture that says
one more day, and around the next bend
lies the ripe country where we’ll plow a blue gorge
wider than the Columbia through the wilderness
of our desire and claim, at last, The Territory of Love.
Junior Gymnastics Karma
On the overcast winter afternoon
you dub yourself Cynic of the Age
travel with my daughter and me
to the Crystal Cup at Salt Lake Community College
and watch her and three hundred
prepubescent pixies torch history’s tournament
of blood with their smiles. Do not doubt.
The sports complex of the cosmos
turns on the sacred torque of give and take.
Thus saith the sturdy woman in
Mighty Mites Cheer and Dance jacket
who distributes laser-green wristbands
at the entrance. She pronounces blessings
on you when you pay instead of sneak
in the back. Her life’s wages: a door-knob
nose, a figure like a sack of produce.
Her grin of broken teeth gleams
like a rain gutter shaggy with January ice.
This world is judgment. Final scores
sift sequins on snow. Long drives
end in long waits. Chump-change scholarships
chain gorgeous Lithuanian women
to the Saturday shift in the snack bar,
the lanky beauty of their volleyball
uniforms the only fair exchange
for three-dollar hot dogs and popcorn.
And you—head bowed on the stand,
awaiting the executioner’s medal, its surface
embossed with bazookas spouting
bouquets of flame, corpses backbending in
mass graves, helicopters applauding
for starving orphans. If you strap on the sexless
leotard of your soul and assemble
at the gate with the spangled ranks from
Top Flight, Idaho Elite, Tiny Titans,
and the team in shimmery peach who flew in
from Texas and swept the all-around—
if you don’t commit the unpardonable sin
of blinding yourself for spite, you might
arc through the lights and land forever
on the morning someone drove
all day to award you the ceremony of your birth.
Statistics from My Daughter’s Sixth Grade Choir Concert
When Miss Hale, one third through her reproductive years,
herds her class onto the risers for Greg Gilpin’s
“Do You Feel the Rhythm?” we clap. Not as
hermaphrodites announcing our presence in rural India,
but as proud parents of kids in black and aquamarine
Choir is Epic! T-shirts. My girl shifts from foot to foot,
and I count twenty students over to find a boy
with an extra rib. The Down’s Syndrome redhead
in blueberry sneakers—Miss Hale’s future son, the longer
she waits to have children—grins and releases nearly all
of the 1.5 pints of gas he produces daily. Between
Curry’s “Down to the River to Pray” and Albrecht’s
“Won’t Grow Up,” I’m transformed. I become
a Gallup lightning rod for fifty-seven percent
of people in Cleveland’s City Hall on National Prayer
Day and skyrocketing dwarfism rates. From the back,
a cough, at sixty miles per hour, punctures an
awkward pause as the pianist’s fingernails grow
faster than her toenails. Who are these youngsters?
I wonder: as they get down-and-dirty-go-go-dancer
for McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Will they be
allergic to deodorant and milk? Who will tell them
they have brains faster than computers, bones stronger
than steel? Which one of ten finger-popping cuties
will send a nude photo of herself to a crush then twine
a scarf in a treble clef around her neck the night
her mother screams an aria in a house filling up with
two pounds of shed skin per person? Bang. Bang.
Miss Hale’s fairy baton drops them like shooting gallery
ducks into cancer, fallen arches, and waterborne waste.
Then my girl looks at me. And I know she will use
all 600,000 of her breaths to adopt black dogs. Already,
her taste buds outnumber mine. Her heartbeat sprints
ahead of the stony riverbeds five pints of blood paint
through my veins. Already, her glance rewrites the world’s
songbook of facts, the epic slogan on the T-shirt
that says we will lick our elbows. We will love longer
than chewing gum stays in the stomach. We will
sing when we have to let go of our 75 to 100 trillion cells.
Matthew James Babcock’s writing has appeared or will appear in Alehouse; Bateau; The Battered Suitcase; The Cape Rock; PANK; Pinyon; Poem; Quiddity; Rattle; The Rejected Quarterly; Slant; The South Dakota Review; The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review; Spillway; Spoon River Poetry Review; Terrain; and Wild Violet. He earned the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award in 2008 and first place in Press 53’s 2010 Open Awards (novella category, “He Wanted to Be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker”). Matthew has his PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is faculty at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg, where he teaches English. His book, Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis, is available from the University of Delaware Press.
