Hearing The Snow

By Peter Halstead

When the lights go out at night,
You can hear the snow begin to fall.
               You can hear the outside color white,
               And the way the pine winds stall.
You can hear the sound of death
And feel the silence in the air
               As the solar system holds its breath,
               And moonlight freezes on the stair.
Crystals of the cosmic powers
Light the tips of forest trees
               As the storm’s dark matter flowers,
               Protecting us from open seas,
Star foam of the solar tide
Staring in at us inside
               While the laces of the planet mesh:
               The laundry of the clouds made flesh.

Explanation

Snow is the sudden materialization of the screen of energy that underlies all matter. Snow’s molecules are larger than the Higgs boson, but they are the way the universe makes a metaphor, how it repeats its invisible patterns in a more visible way, an eternal grid that exists in clouds before adiabatic cooling turns it into more tangible matter: the silent structure of the world made flesh, the trellis out of which universes expanded, skies out of which snow doesn’t so much fall as suddenly appear.
The metaphor that all religions share is that at some point a god becomes flesh in order to explain the link between our watchful eyes and the great skein of cosmic motive, the ultimate metaphor where hidden dark matter reaches out to the spontaneous outburst of free will that humanity represents—that one chess move not anticipated by a universe of logical progressions.