Zastruga
by Kyle Flemmer
this is the anxiety of meaning
wrapped in a white mantle
can myth be consciously created?
is this not the most cynical artifice
to knit with crystalline symmetry
the ridges of false truth?
to read the sastruga
as one reads a marble statue
(f)rigid, aging to be immortal
eroding into permanence
carving striations into holocene granite
tracing a piste in a glacier
kicking through the boilerplate crust
of a québec snowfall
floes jumbled or sintering
on a great lake
this is the arrogance of language
content with nothing
carving myth like an ice sculptor
a maker of totems or choral reef
accretions cut-rough with a chainsaw
nuanced by chisel and smoothed
via propane torch until
definitions are transparent
these are the tracks of an animus
on ripples of niveous wind
a convalescence, an essence
in particulate and particular form
i've witnessed billions of
unobserved snowflakes
is every snowflake unique?
what is a s(no)w flake?
Zastruga by Kyle Flemmer is a Blasted Tree original poem