Wonders, A Prose Poem

I have a special affection for the giant salt piles in Portsmouth Harbor. 

Carl Austin Hyatt, from the Portsmouth Harbor Salt Piles series

The first time I saw them I was struck by the spectacle, the oddness of these large white pyramids perched at the edge of the Piscataqua River. I now know the salt is shipped and piled here to be loaded into trucks for de-icing wintry roads in New Hampshire and southern Maine. But that doesn't quell my fascination.

Carl Austin Hyatt, from the Portsmouth Harbor Salt Piles series

Photographer Carl Austin Hyatt is currently exhibiting large-scale prints culled from an ongoing series of photographs that he's been making on the site over the last several years. 

Carl Austin Hyatt, from the Portsmouth Harbor Salt Piles series

The show opened at Portsmouth's Banks Gallery yesterday, June 18th and will run for a month. You can read a mini-essay I wrote about the series here.

Carl Austin Hyatt, from the Portsmouth Harbor Salt Piles series

Hyatt’s salt piles magnificently transcend the actual. His lens documents a striking spiritual geometry. Removed from their everyday context, their scale rendered ambiguous, the images in Hyatt’s Portsmouth Harbor Salt Pile Series have an epic quality, a sense not just of grandeur, but of the cosmic and the impersonal. 

Seeing Hyatt's images reminded me of a poem I wrote about the same salt piles in the mid-1990s called "Wonders."

Wonders

Among the heaps of scrap metal and salt, pyramids of a neglected Giza, the Bently 799MW caterpillar boom-crane is a motionless sphinx. The pale blue columns of the suspension bridge are the new monuments of kings. Ships depart. Boxcars rumble off on their tracks. The tracks disappear. But which gods are theirs? O slag heaps, crushed Plymouths and cranes! One expected to find a last dark exotic queen dressed for ceremony falling on her sword in your shadows.

Carl Austin Hyatt, from the Portsmouth Harbor Salt Piles series

I highly recommend you see Hyatt's monumental prints in person if you can.