A DESCRIPTION OF THE STORM GLASS AND BRIEF GUIDE TO ITS USE IN FORECASTING WEATHER

I

A sealed dome of glass where crystals,

by an alchemy ‘more precise than precision’, unmake

and make still grottoes that recede

from its blue-doubled curves as if epitomes

of fantastical ambition –

A replica, it would embarrass

by the overconfidence of intention, except those crystals

in colours of obduracy, which is to say,

uncoloured, blank of eye, formalise the inwardness

of weather and contract hemispheres of wind

to a decorative instance: a northerly

forms in it ‘leaves of fern or yew’ and, by that version of tact

which gives volume to silence,

its crystals retreat from tempest into the vanishing point

of their dimension –

II

In a Storm Glass crystals

with the exactness peculiar to foreboding make neural

flare shapes: ultrasound-

coloured threads cross-stitched with blank, as of sensation

excised and here, preserved in light.

It is tomorrow’s weather

haunting a small room. Clouds, which hurry for no one,

which, amassing,

betoken that undifferentiated grudge some call ambition,

here confide motive without gesture

as if to say ‘There is another world.

It is in this one’ – this sealed glass, structure of feeling

in place of thought,

where images fold into images the way a child disappears

into the film in which she plays herself –

III

Original of Snow Domes –

soundproof rooms of repeating weather, of figurines

in time-lapse flurries

of glitter rain – not for shaking, shaken, a Storm Glass

begins again its self-assembling –

workmanship of an almost

substanceless precision. It is reinventing weather as a keepsake.

Only its double-curved glass, which

builds in parallax, makes it more like an instrument of hauntings,

as if to say He gave his whole life to become

his idea of himself. So, tireless,

and without the extravagance of waves,

a Storm Glass amasses

its precarious adornment, this needlework in quartz,

mistakeable for regret –