It is winter.
It is cold. It is freezing.
You’ve left a bottle of water in the car, and as you throw yourself into the driver’s seat, grumpy and hassled, you notice it. The water inside is clear—still, like glass behind the plastic—and you pick it up, thinking to throw it into the back seat so that the coffee you simply would not compromise on might take its rightful place in the cupholder.
The bottle is colder than it looks, and as your eyes are drawn to it, your most ancient sense demanding your animal attention, you see the water start to cloud, feel the bottle go from the give of fluid to the stubbornness of solid.
You were sure it was a liquid. You saw it with your eyes.
The bottle is solid now. Ice now.
Your ears catch the sound of your breath, your nose and tongue the taste of cold stale air, and your eyes see the ice that your hand feels. You know that something has happened, but you don’t know how. Your senses confirm it. For a bright slice of time you wonder, is this magic? Did I just see magic? (Did I just do magic?) Every fantasy book or movie or show you have ever known strikes you like lightning before you remember, before you step back on the path.
If you are unlike me, and have some physics and chemistry close at hand, perhaps you will know what they named this. If you are like me, you might use a broader word, one with more color, one with wider arms all the better for picking you up to carry you with.
Ultimately, they mean enough of the same thing.
Nucleation. Crystallization.
The moment of phase shift, of molecular reordering where one thing becomes another and the only clarity we are left with is that our human certainties about the nature of things are simply the shallow surf, and not the deep water we fancied ourselves to know.
This is what I seek from poetry.
I seek a discernable lattice of choices that work in tandem to deliver an intentional and impactful gesture, a trans-mitted/lated/muted/substantiated experience. This impact does not necessarily have to imply a certain level of saturation, volume, brightness or gravity; rather, impact means simply that it is affecting, that like a sudden cold, it changes your brain. I seek both the surprise of hidden architecture revealing itself, and the guided tour with audio commentary; the towering cloud, and the rain it brings at last.
I seek the slow heat and pressure that organizes a diamond, the trembling touch that creates a pyramid of bismuth, the un-careful shake that makes ice of a bottle of cold water.
Rutilated quartz. Moss agate and rose gypsum.
Horsehair burnt into glaze, and Lichtenberg figures on skin.
The strike and the ruin. The meadow and the wildfire.
If I were to give any advice it would be to follow through, to intend, to alchemize the unsayable and mysterious (which does not mean to speak the unspeakable or unveil what has been occluded). To remember that the reader is moved to understand as much as the writer is moved to express.
