Always and only from material.
A drop of water changes shape if it falls through an electric field(the thunderstorm, say, that gave God material formin Job, then in Lear trued troposphere to terror).The drop takes the shape of a spindle (the same that turns,in the myth of Er, on the knees of Necessity)and sends out from tl1e positively-charged spindle-pointa slender filament of electrical force.Or take your red blood cells, which in the blood itselfretain the shape of a dimpled disc, a spongyrubber ball squeezed lightly between finger and thumb.A little water, though, to thin that blood, and the cellturns spherical; a little salt, and the entirecell shrinks and puckers, grape into raisin.Mysteries attend even membrane formation.No pure liquid ever froths or foams. Somethingmust be dissolved or suspended, to sustainthe additional surface area, the passagefrom smooth and taut to bubbled and subdivided.I feel subdivided, denatured, quasi-solid.I often fall through electrical fields. I can speakonly as I do: in fragments, of a continuum.
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- March 7, 2024
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“Always and only from material.” from Bored in Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark: by H. L. Hix
Published by Middle Creek Publishing on March 28, 2023.
Copyright © 2024 by H. L. Hix.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
H. L. Hix was born in Oklahoma and raised in various small towns in the south. After earning his B.A. from Belmont College (now Belmont University) and his Ph.D. (in philosophy) from the University of Texas, Hix taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and was an administrator at the Cleveland Institute of Art, before joining the faculty of the University of Wyoming, where, after a term as director of the creative writing MFA, he now teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Creative Writing Program. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai University, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at Yonsei University in Seoul, and the “Distinguished Visitor” at the NEO MFA. He teaches in the low-residency MFA at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
H. L. Hix demonstrates a Thoreauvian burrowing of the mind—a burrowing of fifty poems—into fifty “seed sentences” from fifty “soil texts” from natural history. The poems burrow, too, into common yet rarified encounters with “the carcass of an elk,” or the sun which “contains all direction,” or the “breathing of Breathing” of a “fresh-brushed red-brown ribcage-rounded coat” of a horse. We readers are invited to burrow along with Hix, not unlike “generations of a beetle species” who can “migrate /deeper into a cave than any individual / could travel to get out.” The exploration yields glimpses of the mystic part and the elusive, mythic whole as well as a profound and sobering reflection of the human experience upon planet Earth.
—Aaron M. Moe, author of exhalations
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