Rime

This is a somewhat arcane love poem, embodying the concept of Philip K. Dick’s “Adjustment Team,” where hidden powers, in this case snow crystal formation cycles, decide our fates, as snow shapes are decided at birth, as people are linked by similar forces in the “cloud,” and possibly meant for one another.

I wanted to write a poem about cosmic design which was crafty enough that it couldn’t be used by the crazed proponents of “intelligent design,” who use religious concepts to negate science. In fact, science, when explored, underwrites at times the reassuring concept of a universe whose rules tolerate or even nurture human existence. But that user-friendly cosmos doesn’t then degenerate into a mushy Charlton Heston Moses movie, all knowledge replaced by Biblical phrases (as knowledgeable as those phrases might be). Being educated by Jesuits on the meditations of St. Theresa and Francis of Assisi, which share with Tibetan Buddhism the hope of a benign state of being, I am always on the lookout for wormholes or scientific phenomena which replace logic with the inscrutable, Donne’s “things invisible to see,” and the ways of describing those events logically, completing the circle, a hybrid of the Romantic and Metaphysical eras.

As snow crystals form in clouds, their shapes are dictated by temperature, which combines water molecules in fractal ways not yet mapped. So the mystery of snow shapes happens behind the scenes. Once those crystals land on us, we have definitions that describe but don’t explain them.

I wanted to memorialize the beautiful snowfall on Cathy’s 63rd birthday, which had the largest flakes we’d ever seen, giant crystal cities which splotched on the windshield and covered our clothes in a few seconds, mottling the ugliness, the “vast mistake” of town with what scientists call “fernlike stellar dendrites,” which are lego-like crystals piling on crystals like a football scrum, a process called “accretion.” Despite their expansive branches, they are a single tree, or crystal. Dendrite means “tree-like.”

A further mutation of crystals happens when frozen water drops cling to the crystals, a humpback flake we call “rime.” The underlying foundation of the crystal is called a lattice, where molecules congregate to build the diamond-like facets which are ten million times larger than the components which somehow control them. As small as a snowflake is, it is an immense city built instantly by an understanding between atoms, so that things too small to be seen (atoms) control things too large to be seen (galaxies). This is a spatial form of the butterfly effect, where events in time alter later events: events in space alter later spaces.

So some lives may entwine long before we can sit back and deduce a pattern to them. If we are lucky, those patterns are benign.

A friend of mine hypothesized that I came up with a word or phrase and then filled in the blanks to write poems. I suppose this is my more detailed description of how poems are written, with the same mysterious adiabasis in which crystals set out to the lowland.

In Greek, anabasis is an ascent, diabasis as a river crossing. Xenophon’s Anabasis describes the journey from the coast to the interior, although mostly the retreat back to the sea, so the word, as words will, has come to mean its opposite. Adiabasis in Greek means “no trespassing.” In energy exchange, no heat trespasses from one state to another. Snow is a process of adiabatic cooling