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Matthew Hunt is an inveterate traveler, mountaineer, and musician. He has released music as Slim Hunt, Slim Rosa, and The Iris Bell and performs regularly. He lives in Washington DC with his wife and children.
The Black Swan
From far on darkened river shores
A flight is set that undoes men’s fortunes
For we have counted four hundred or more
Of that white grace by evening summer’s lull,
And have retired into the dream
That life is light and ease
And forgotten that all the world
Is but a pause between upheavals,
A breath amongst chaos.
Dark against the sky,
And dark under wing,
The swan departs.
I shudder with despair.
The earth will have its weeping,
And sinking, hollow hearts.
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About The Black Swan
A “black swan” is a statistical anomaly. The Roman poet Juvenal is usually credited with its theory. The name comes from an instance where someone is sitting by a pond counting the swans that land, and noting their color. Most swans are white. The first swan is white, the second is white, the third, and so on. Such develops the mathematics until you ask someone to wager on the probability that the next swan will be white as well. As the number grows, the probability become 75%, then 90%, then 95%, then 99%. Our certainty piles up that the next swan will also be white. Until, of course, it isn’t, and all that we understand about the natural world, about our lives, about the certainty that things will be as they were, disappear. And in hindsight, we feel that we’ve really seen clearly, even though we haven’t. September 11 was a black swan. We think we understand it now, but no one understood it the day before. Your lover has cancer, which seems obvious now, but she was fine until yesterday, and now our world is upended. The Black Swan speaks to the uncertainty of life, which is in fact certain, but only in the most random fits of normalcy.
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The Boneyard
“Glory is fleeing”, writes one from long ago,
And so I am not surprised to see them lying there,
Twisted, rusted, or with cancerous, welded juts
Paroxysms of rivets, once holding and once held,
The vertebrae of these Jurassic industrials,
Dimly hint at the great skeletons that loomed in city or field.
There are no archaeologists here, no historians,
None who might divine function from these great forms,
And write of the shadows of times past,
Of their silent resilience in the specter of human activity,
Of the guardians who bore fire, and steam.
There is none but this lonely observer,
Coming as a mourner to a grave.
Writes another, “Look! They are proud of their tower
And their labor, but I will scatter them!”
And so I walk amongst them, flinching not at
The tall grasses which hourly swallow these girders,
Which nightly fold upon these joists, and sigh not,
Knowing that all of nature has conspired in their destruction.
They die well
And stubbornly
Like aging soldiers far from the fronts of their youth.
Colder eyes could not be cast on death,
Though in life did they know a deeper chill,
Where faint eyes and hearts dreamt of bend or spill,
Even as the husks of steam cathedrals rose from clay and rock,
Still like brave and unyielding sentries, stood,
And shook these eyes with testaments of will.
On occasion, human life has, too,
Known something of this,
Though in our own boneyards lie the mass of men,
Their mass the mix of weight and deed,
Of dreams uncolored and destiny unspent,
Of courage undistilled.
Would that our works were not so composed,
Our ends might meet the steel’s repose.
And sleep, too, these turbines,
And there, those tanks,
Their huffings stilted, as they lay lifeless in a pool of oily blood,
Hoppers line the heaps like a hedgerow of coffins,
Stolid and solemn as a medieval crypts.
Awake! Awake!
Ever flowing the work from head to hand
Cries for release of earth, and rock, and sand!
The fragrance of silverweed and dandelion,
Known never by scent, but rather by heat
That creeps in itchings, upon arms and legs,
Tussles in the air with the char of diesel.
And to each returns my native soul,
Recognizing both and longing for each.
One, the composition of our bodies,
The other, the products of our thoughts.
Still, while earthly walks proceed dutifully,
Downward goes our gaze,
Our eyes look ever upward,
Holding everything, relinquishing nothing.
What then, can I take from this place?
What elements will slowly free themselves from our purpose?
What can any man take from any cemetery?
Melancholic shiver, or a despairing face?
Fortune’s quiver, or a flickering grace?
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About The Boneyard
My father ran a steel shop. The “boneyard” was where they collected all the joists, beams, tanks, and plates that had once been a part of the industrial process, but which had now been stripped and were waiting for some second life where we might find additional use for them. I spent my summers as a teen cutting up these pieces, supposedly because they could be salvaged. The poem is a metaphor for life – where we all are slowly being used up, perhaps, as we get older, hoping for a second act. William Turner is my favorite painter, and “The Fighting Temeraire” was much on my mind as I wrote this. Things of glory, things we build for power, for money, for fame – they fall apart, no matter what strength we impart to them. I thought of “The Boneyard” as the thing we construct for ourselves, which ultimately will fail, but upon which we still much hold our lives together.
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The End of the World
The apocalypse does come, eventually,
Although not as you think,
With a god raining fire
And burning to ash the works of man.
It is the arrival of the Spanish on the coasts,
The Mongols descending from the steppes,
The Germans moving eastward,
Cities are burned, and men put to the sword,
Women and children defiled and scattered,
Until then, there had only been prophecy,
And in some unspoken wish,
A desire for annihilation.
And now that it has come and past,
The scriptures are fulfilled.
However, those Germans, those Spaniards-
Their myths are just beginning,
Celebrating the birth of the world,
And the coming golden age.
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About The End of the World
This poem was written on the spot, in one take, at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I had finished a read of the history of the fall of the Aztec Empire the night prior, of Cortes’ destruction of what was perhaps the greatest city in the world at its time. I wondered, how is it that we feel that our achievements last forever, that our beautiful churches, our palaces, our art, our accomplishments, stand so tall in our imagination, but are simply idols to be burned by our enemies, and there is no objective way of distinguishing between the two. We kill in order to live, and another dies so that we can be “civilized”. It is cruel and unfair, but seems to be the way the world muddles along.
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Spanish Moss
What ghosts go dancing on the wind
And leave their dress and tresses fall
Like some dark coven shook within
A moonlit pyre by celestial ball?
Each morning I awake to find
Detritus from the spectral prowl
Remains of movements saturnine
And echoes of a distant howl
I have looked deeply in the trees
When evening time they start to heave
And thought to steal into their darkened leaf
So unto shadowed ballroom speed.
But then a gust reveals the cold,
The lonely music of the dance,
And through the sun’s last sinking mold
I feel the tremors of the trance.
And quick to fires quickly shut
And from the stout and tempered glass
I watch the swirl of woodland rut
And pray the night to safely pass.
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About Spanish Moss
I am originally from South Georgia, a place of relative boredom, and unremarkable in many ways, at least to the native. But I have been struck by my friends who have visited and commented on the evocativeness of the landscape, in particular the Spanish moss that hangs from every oak and walnut. So if I were to remember one thing of my home, it would be the ghostly remains of the moss that outlines the moonshine that passes through them in the evening. It is stately in the daytime and eerie at night, and as with most things that hover in our hearts, and stick in our minds, we cannot explain why they hold us, why they are beautiful, and why we hold them dear. With most things, we carry these mysteries with us always.
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