The snowfall that builds to mere inches and the snowfall that dissipates immediately both obscure the scenery, but each in their own way.
A floodlight at the far corner of a funeral home’s expansive front lawn, (which in this age of matchstick utopia is a considerable homage to the departed), captured the opacity of white as it rode helplessly on the back of the wind.
It was as if the mantle of a microscope had been projected tens of feet above where the sidewalk met with the parlor’s perimeter wall. From the view of a nearby window, these illuminated clots of snow left no visible trace once they crossed into the darkness.
They appeared like the delicate flakes that build to mere inches and fall just short of crashing into the windowpane. The spotlight was roughly six feet in diameter and as it captured their movement, it revealed and magnified the air of transparency surrounding the event. The weight of water provided that their bodies be viewed within this circular realm, and inside this stance of light and dark was the only snow that appeared to fall that night.
The latter days of winter are filled with varying degrees of obscurity. Small ponds that endure days beyond the last traces of snow disavow what lies beneath them.
Rumors and uncertainties are traded among the various common goods of communal commuters, whose breath keeps transparent in the patterned blow of the under-seat vents. Their rage succeeds impatience and comes to pass before manifesting consciously. The endorphin waves break within a fraction of a second while the clock overhead displays the hours and minutes.
The degrees of silence are misleading and the snowfall secures no future for itself. The sky is filled with patterns that suggest other climates while the earliest flowers, entranced by the increased hours of daylight, prepare themselves for bloom.
But none of this was seen inside the floodlight’s gleam nor just beyond the arc’s completion. The opacity of night behind the crystalline descent was subdued by the incandescent glow, drawing itself further back within the spotlight and allowing the dimensionality of snow to fall forward towards the light source.
The evening passed around the floodlight’s fixed perspective and the wind moved silently into the expanse of black surrounding the light. The warble between seasons is filled with uncertainties and the waxing daylight breeds suspicion and doubt as the daze of torpor still lingers among the sun’s impending victory.
Hexagon Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Saturnine by Brittany Ham. Inspired by the mystical writings of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Teresa de Avila and the prophet Ezekiel, Ham’s book of prose poetry chronicles a visionary experience that unfolds across the Saturnine moons and recounts the construction and consecration of a celestial temple between the Earth and the Moon in celebration of the Moon’s purity.
Copies are available through the hexagon press website. For more details, please visit our publications page.
Poetry is not a dying language, in the colloquial sense. If it ceased to exist, its past erased, it would be like a disembodied spirit awaiting recapture by a successive host. The process of creation that is seeded in poetry is a perpetual state of dying. It is a cycle of decay that one enters into just by transcribing a thought and giving the ghost its shell, but surely this is a necessary sacrifice—what matters is one’s awareness of this sacrifice.
Layers of paper congeal into a crude mâché that hardens between bouts of winter rain and through the long stretches of summer’s light. These fragments of signage suggest an absence that only grows larger as innumerable black recesses emerge from out of the magnification—the enlarged thing begins to break down as its details populate and expand upon the craters and fissures until they take over the entire view, revealing the depth of absolute black and the ground from which any one thing may arise. The words themselves are activated by the imposition of thought and their tangibility is necessary for the exchange—it is in this revealing act that we see erosion move in and out, while always drawing near to pure black.
There is never an end or solution, and this process of erasure becomes the driving force of language. Matter broken down to its ultimate end becomes mere particles, which is the closest it can come to knowing destruction. Language is not so different—poetic verse is like the basin of a foregone lake and the varying levels of magnification disclose different ridges and recesses that open into new terrains filled with microscopic faults of their own. Erosion is by no means limited to physicality. It requires only a starting point and from there it will lead itself along its own path across the course of time. It reveals itself as an attempt to bridge the insurmountable gap between the thing itself and its representation, and when it is fully employed its faults become all the more apparent. There is never any resolution, only the increased tension of what is contained.
Any constructed thing is subject to its own process of decay. Language is an invisible construction whose reflection can be projected back onto itself, meaning that it can be re-conceived at will because it is always dying but never dead. There is no act of completion nor any closed circle because it always falls short of what it strives to contain and the accumulating pressure causes new fissures to erupt. Poetry hinges on that last breath that leads into yet another, and the wandering cycle passes between living forms and the tumult of expectation in a suspended state of neither here nor there, leaving its broken traces all around.
The socio-cultural environment is analyzed, selected and assimilated into the camouflage so it can be presented back to the populous and accepted as healthy and clear, which it unfailingly does since the guise of transparency is crafted from the collective desires of the beholder and synchronized with the ever-accelerating speed of culture. It is a closed circle that continues to grow smaller until the individual and the humanized corporate entity become symbiotic. For even in progress, the field may shrink smaller and smaller until everything that remains is completely interchangeable. The tops of the buildings strive to emulate the harshness of the evening sun, moving closer until it dwindles into the last shades of blue merging with soft yellow and then the blue turns to violet and quietly the sky becomes dark and their silhouettes slip into the darkness below the radio towers flashing red.
Though Babylon seems far now, at times, we must remember that it is everywhere. Still, here the air is thicker with oxygen and lighter on the syntaxes of abomination propped up by flimsy & counterfeit silicon birthrights, available to all for the price of nothing more than a bowl of GMO pottage. Now when I look skyward, I no longer see the faces of the Goddesses, those shadowy masks all puffed up with the pride of the entrepreneur, yet still cognizant enough of their own baseness to never show their true forms outright.
Theirs is a landscape of esoteric brushstrokes lambasted onto the blank surface of the glorious, honest mundane. The effect is quite garish to those who have worked at strengthening the intuition by the simple and oft-repeated exercise of looking around at the world, rather than simply turning left or right at every one of the prescribed road signs one sees along life’s neatly planned & immaculately maintained picture-postcard highway system.
We are still here, for those of you who have asked, though we are no longer there. We are somewhere new. Everything I write from this new place applies to Brittany as well as to myself. As individuals, the two of us often find ourselves at odds over this or that trifle or crumb of manifesting thought-spark, but as editors, yes as editors we speak with one voice. Sometimes as we traversed the spires below the Goddesses’ rigid robes, we thought we saw careful traps laid there to snare us. Fortunately, our enemies in their vanity can’t resist advertising openly, making them easy to avoid.
There were also quiet places, places of simple contentment, and sometimes we found one nestled away in an unlikely spot, and there would be an old woman playing piano in the half-light like a melancholy, soft weeping for all that we have lost, nay, impulsively given away whenever our minds became unnavigable with obstructions and we desired a surcease of our painful conceptions. On the wall beyond a lily-embellished balustrade, perceptible only as the candlelight chanced to dance its way through the open spaces, I spied a coat of arms and, pointing it out to my companion, we were reminded that there would be a bill to pay at the close of evening.
And we were reminded of the Goddesses, they who oversee & they who collect on all debts with no outwardly visible actions on their part, just their stern & mysterious presence, and we knew that sooner or later we would be forced to leave, not just our dining table, but their entire domain, as they were growing more powerful by the day and we, too sensitive to exist within their widening sphere of influence indefinitely.
I can’t keep writing about the same thing forever.
Hexagon Press will be celebrating the release C.E.N Vol. V: Contra Equum Niveum at the Casemore Kirkeby group exhibition opening for Option to the Death of Freedom, curated by Petra Bibeau. Copies of the new issue will be available during the opening of the exhibition and thereafter while copies last.
The full announcement of the exhibition can be found here.