Scientific American - USA (2012-12)

28 Scientific American, December 2021

METER

Edited by Dava Sobel

Glenn R. McLaughlin is the 2013 Poet Laureate of Montgomery

County, Pennsylvania. He worked in the chemical industry for

30 years before becoming a teacher of high school chemistry and

physics. His four self-published collections of poems and essays

include Forms of Lectio,* which was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer

Award in Poetry in 2009.

Detached Retina Imaging

Getty Images

The

Scalar Nature

of Snow

elusive

if not rare.

there are always vectors

and other values

if not measured

at least felt or experienced

at the boundary of ground:

imbalance and, therefore, movement.

the creation comes, then

with the condition of height and time:

eight stories up

suspended in a moment

binary values

of ones and zeroes—

just snow

or not snow—

no vectors of momentum

or spin

no description of unique shape

or crystalline order

just points to move between

floating to observe

as picking through pond lilies

or stars in the winter sky

there or not there

in this moment

the scalar nature of snow

*No longer in print but will be reissued electronically in early 2022 and as part of a new volume, Hear Here: Selected Poems (LuLu).