A Lyrical Refutation of Thomas Kinkade

February 21, 2012 Dennis Junk

FIRELIGHT ON A SNOWY NIGHT: A Lyrical Refutation

I was eager to get out when I saw the storm, the swarm of small shadowed blurs descending

in swerves to create

a limn of white, out into the soft glowing sky of a winter night, peering through the

dark as those blurs

become streaking dabs as they pass through spheres of yellow lamplight, countless, endlessly

falling, engulfing

those sad, drooping, fiery lenses depending on their stoic posts.

I think of those Thomas Kinkade pictures my mom loves so much—everybody’s mom

loves so much—

and I have to admit they almost manage to signal it, that feeling, that mood.

Cold, brutal, uncaring wind, and a blanketing blankness of white struggled through

by the yellow and orange

warm vibrant doings of unseen humans, those quaint stone bridges over unimaginably

frigid, deathly chilling water,

somehow in their quaintness, in their suggestion of, insistence on, human ingenuity,

human doggedness, those scenes

hold out the promise of an end to the coldness, an end to the white nothing that fails,

year after year, to blot out world.

Those pictures are lies though—in almost conveying the feeling, the mood, they

do it an injustice.

In willfully ignoring the barren, venous, upward clawing, fleshed branches that rake

the eerily luminescent wind-crowned sky,

and failing to find a symbol to adequately suggest the paradoxical pace of the flakes

falling, endlessly falling

through those yellow, orange spheres of light—hurried but hypnotically slow, frantic

but easily, gracefully falling,

adjusting their cant to invisible, unforeseen and unforeseeable forces.

The story of human warmth defying the frigid, impersonal harshness of a colorless,

lifeless cosmos—

in trying desperately to please, just to please, those pictures offend—that’s

only half the story.

The woman who lit the fire sending out its light through the windows, she’s aging—

every covering of snow

is another year in the ceaseless procession, and the man, who worked so doggedly

at building a scaffold

and laying the stones for that charming bridge, he’s beyond reach of the snow, two or three

generations gone since his generous feat.

The absence of heat is its own type of energy. The wet-lashing night air is charged with it,

like the pause after a breath

awaiting the inevitable inhale—but it holds off, and holds off. Inevitable? Meanwhile,

those charged particles

of shocking white, tiny, but with visible weight—they’d kiss your cheek if you

opened your coat

and you’d know you’d been kissed by someone not alive. The ceaseless falling

and steady accumulation,

hours and days and years—humans create watches and clocks to defy time, but

this relentless rolling over

of green to white, warm to cold, thrilling, rejuvenating spring to contemplative, resigned

autumn, this we watch helplessly,

hopefully, hurtling toward those homes so far beneath the snow.

The air is charged, every flake a tiny ghost—no tinier, though, than any of us merits—

haunting the slippery medium

of night we might glide through so slow, so effortless, so sealed up to keep in our warmth,

turned inward on ourselves.

The hush, the silent yawn, is haunted with humanity’s piled up heap of here and gone,

and haunted too with

our own homeless, friendless, impossibly frightening future.

The homes of neighbors friendly donning matching caps, alike in our mutual blanketing, our

mutual muting.

Those paintings of cozy lit houses in the winter harshness remind me of the juxtaposition

of fright and absence of true threat,

those opposites we feel when young, the trick, the gift of some masterful ghost story,

properly told in such a scene,

and this night, snow creaking underfoot like those ill-hinged doors opening all on

their own, raising chills,

this night is haunted too, but less with presence than with utter absence, here and gone,

all those troubled souls,

their existence of no more consequence than the intricacy suddenly annihilated as it

collides with the flesh

just beneath my eye, collides and instantly transforms into something more medium

than message and

no sooner lands than begins to evaporate.