Nucleation

A sky pregnant with snow, clouds drifting like chemicals in a darkroom, all of it suggesting brooding affinities, clusters of clouds, milling friends, the way people come together on dark nights, until our memories are developed like photos.

These memories are triggered not by the angels on the eaves, but conversely by the faults nestled in the landscape of our lives. All these problems merge into a clutch, an agglomeration which makes a song, a storm, a person. It’s the same process.

The way a pearl grows, the way ice-cold water clusters around a flaw in the fluid, the way ice congealing generates heat, counterintuitively, forming a protective ring of molecules that gathers around a speck of dust, ultimately turning the water to nature’s ultimate shield, ice.

Ice is a symbol of the defects in our human natures, of the defects in the air (and there are almost always defects). These defects make storms, sublimation, and blizzards possible, because of the flaws in the atmosphere. As so many cosmic functions are, like the rotation of planets, the process is almost musical. That is, the cosmos is a Broadway musical. Maybe a Milky Way miracle.

Storms develop out of shadows, flaws, in matter which we can’t see but which combine invisibly to create major events that roil our atmosphere.

This is a poem about the formation of snow, but also about the formation of the human condition. It snows because our perfect air is in fact imperfect; thus we exist as well because the world is imperfect, and the turbulence of matter flows from those flaws.

I wrote this on the anniversary of the solstice; it’s a poem about the gears that subtly keep us in existence, about the processes that develop us like photos in a dark room.