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).