ditch,

Matthew Hall has returned to University, this time in the Southern Hemisphere, and is working under the tutelage of one of Cambridge’s architects of modern language. His academic work will cover varying aspects of Russian Futurism as well as the more experimental aspects of the Cambridge School. His poetry has recently been featured in Forget Magazine, The Hudson Review of Poetry, Jones Av. and Fieldstone Review amongst others.

I

          Elongated figures  │  Peripatetic dolls

     Precision of verbosity  │  Inventing false limbs

         Resemble answers  │  Peripheral tongues

          Fastened audibly   │  Striking succession

         Parables indirectly  │   Permitted grievances

   Functional entombment │   Provoked evasions 

             Oblique sounds  │   Leafless immobility

             Clasped bodies  │   Natural resistance  

II

          Careful recital     │    Perfect zeal

  Thrust of conviction     │     Incomplete theory

     Manically aroused     │     Battalion chorus

       Villainous choice     │     Fierce vacancy

         Seasonal sepia     │     Translating punches

  Visceral opportunity      │    Bearable salience

             Wet breath      │     Sacred residue

III

      Prostrate majesty      │     Confined knowingly

              Vocal assay      │     Impending morning

                Bowing so       │    Narcissus reflected

             Crucial guide      │     Clumsily mobile

           Living abruptly      │     Elusive growth

          Crude imitation      │     Adversely so

   Dangerous inventions     │     Your minute touch

            Limitless grasp     │      Following motion

IV

         Parity reflected      │      Blue shadows

      Remote familiarity      │     Habitable light

     Remains dominant       │     Fictional extent

      Painful asymmetry      │     Shell structure

              Fitful relief        │     And sullied

     Sharp resemblance      │     By contrast

V

                                  Inexperience falls     │     Filial gestures

                                   Inviting moment      │     Disguising memory

                                 Certain relation         │    Subtle alchemy

                                  Which logarithms      │     Monstrous creations

Clandestine accomplishment      │     Profound harbour      │    Hissing winds     

                                    Confusing forms      │     Indulge specifically

                             Permanent implications    │     Refined experience

                                    The mute present    │      Comprised moment

                                 Precise existence       │     Divided phrases

                  Secret distortions      │        Lives codified        │    Weak instruments  

                              A sculpture’s portrait      │     Accumulating truth

VI

    Dumbly transparent      │     Nothing vertiginous

          A thin yearning      │     Delicate appetite

 Elongated the depths       │     The depths condensed

  Nocturnal abundance      │     Filters of light

             Inward tremor     │     Inspired quietus

        Variegated plume      │      Ebbed motion

        Usurping elasticity     │      Dome of flesh

                    A bell jar     │      An empty womb

       Cavernously hollow     │      Lantern in the sea 

VII

                 By comparison       │      Not conjecture

                   Forms appear      │      From ambiguous sentiment

               Exacting balance      │      Condition of bone

              Empty distraction      │      Though retained

       Communal indifference      │       Of the fulcrum

     Topographic distribution      │       Pathology of syntax

             Weighed meanings      │       Unfold immeasurably

Within the series, The Fulcrum Poems, it is my intention to introduce a phantasmagoria, a shifting of illusions, without fixed form, yet from which a fixed form can be derived and brought into accord. The balance of each line is sometimes a dichotomy, sometimes a comparison and sometimes a representation of the weight given to each side of the line. The balance point is used here as a device by which to balance and measure the form and the structure that can be taken from within the ambiguous sentiment created by the division of two separate phrases, or two separate ideas. To loosely paraphrase Sartre’s comment in Saint Genet; there is a difference between that which I feel and that which I play at feeling, thus the ambiguity must constitute the sentiment. Therefore, in the presentation of these poems the image remains the central figure however vague it may seem at first inspection. When one is forced to balance that which is presented (or multiple aspects/characteristics of one thing as it is presented), ambiguously or axiomatically, the form, the idea, that fragmentary object should remain in the hands of the reader.