Critical Terms in the Atmospheric Sciences

Troy Sherman

Volume One, Issue One, “Atmosphere,” Poetry


 
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The certitude of space is brought
to me by a flight of birds. It
is grey outside and there is a trembling:
fog is too heavy a word.

– Etel Adnan, “The Indian Never Had a Horse”

Figure 1.jpg

Azimuth: A measure of discord between air and itself; cold and dry, but useful for some modes of cognition (≠cognate). To find your orientation, perform azimuth/language. To take flight, pick this apart like a warm dead bird (here, azimuth ≃ augur).

Azure, opal, junket. Truncate, stunted, angle. Acute like a little pullet, held in your hand with a slight cupped curl of fingers. Held like ether and might slip through. But azimuth with a pluck of breath and your lips round to palpate. Azi-muth like its small soft fricative;

or

Azimuth. Brash and vicious from tip to its teeth. Viscous too, but incalculably so: airy fold in broad repose, a preening measure with no name for value. Azimuth: lithe god of stasis with head of crow and dark folded limbs, obtuse like its syntax. Raging Azimuth!: Proffer your immutable unguent! Guileful Azimuth!: Grant for us a small translation, from self into stone or vapor…

but more likely,

azimuth

auklet

alveolar

aspirate.

Figure 2.jpg

Macrodispersion: Reckless expressions of transitivity, in terms of beat and borrow; how masses slip from state through state. If in open fray, a brash surge outwards. But soft sides and supple landings where small’s supposed to be: instead, paths of gaseous hull.

Gusts roll down for three or four: guts and offal, heaps of moment shook from their husks. Confluent, or contours — of shape, with mass, a plosive thrum of solely. In these “we doe see, how when the South winde bloweth, the aire is thickned into thinne clouds.” Their trace rends flow back into oneness. To slough fingers through great muck of sky is to

limn

the

vapors

with a

selfsame

look

of

lapidary.

In the diaphane, “as in a glasse, the Images being farre distant… are reflected, which immediately at the falling of the clowdes vanish awaye.” This is the “archive of sky”: intemperate, or a place with no expanse. Only furling back into others.

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Zonal Flow Instability: An inclination that makes motion more a plastic art.

Air’s like a calque, but bellwether’s better – it bears more than it can carry in its thin dull hide. For example:

lack of sound,
little stones,
a deep field;

furrows and tempo;

flora,
lacunae;

stuff from peak to pallid ground.

These work like speech or films on nature, and transmute often. Accordingly: “All real processes on the planet, including atmospheric motions, are dissipative.”

Figure 4.jpg

Advection: Of being upturned, if only in aspect.

Aesthesia’s dermal aspect revolves in air. Its visage: laminar: recombinant only upon unheaval. “The shapes of bodyes by the force of nature,” the weight of winds by pulp and pubis, “may easely be expressed in the moyst aire” (as shadowy spectacle see image above, but as just mutability compare with its index). “After the same sorte” of performance, “ye Images of things are in things.” Not just in things but of them — congealing vapors, gaseous heft of weightlessness. By their own these husks drop freely, in brash accord through brush of tunnel. Tintinnabulant and empty, groans like pinging hush of verdant:

“…congregated clouds,

And all the vapory turbulence of heaven,

Involve the face of things” 

And things like these are vacant: congregant ether or the blue vernal rush. (Clouds of flies you step through.) They make loci mantic in their toss and eddy, make flows dehisce and pointless. Medial like this, but also pleasure: “Atmosphere windward like sexual feeling and as unpredictable, thick and vapory.”

Here transferal has the look of transcendence, but only on high.

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Superrotation: To feel a rush is here a superseding: windward laps toward stasis while movement makes itself a home. Works like a circumfix with wind in every angle. Numbered like relations and pictured through these. But only sensed, as ecumenic, at great swirling heights.

Rogations for a sphere and the film that floats

round stative crags, see image above:

feeble waves rushing doubled then

crashing back like billowed brush

into bludgeon. (Superposition:)

sleek fields of breeze and burrow

move thick and weightless, just like

a large round yearning; grazing:

around it: a suppliant. For a too-tight gasp of halo or

ubiquity – celerity: synonyms, but only from the

ground up. Violence kept to sunken scrape

by its small supple impulse. Penance as

pull of moving, irruption unmet by distance

between things that are and things that shudder

in matter’s states of disbelief. Locus instead seems

comparative of, and slower even still.

                  

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High-Collisionality Regime: Chaos caused by thin brash ripples of heterogeneity. (e.g., snap like limb but brusque like breeze a canted flow from                       things just standing swarms              real teeming swarms of stuff (and notstuff too) like vast fickle                  figures infinite encompassing emboldened by blank dregs of                  predestination and matter motion met like Demons at an empty                    (emptyseeming) crux with simple                        yes or (crash) subverted to great entropic manifold an implicate of                     particles drawn in then out            of atoms crushed infrangible for their small fast union curved by             curvature of an affect that is through isn’t another crash in                 verse of matter of                 fact that choice brings heat to order like a monist bulb but                even still “it is evident that his

molecules are very different than ours.”)

Figure 7.jpg

Low-Collisionality Regime: vide supra.

(But inverted.)

Figure 8.jpg

Adiabatic: Dark searing system with no points of egress. Its logic is the sound of patter but its feeling is a pulse like the blood in your neck.

What does it take for space to be thick with itself? Teeming skein of empty? The bland rush of not through nothing?

(vibrant speck that

VIBRATE.

wile of random, driving cast of

HOLLOW

to be

BRIMMING.)

Gray void, knotted vacuum: a vacuous gradient with, at its core, a color.



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Troy Sherman is an art historian and Venti editor who likes to think about bugs, systems, bad art, and computers. This is Troy’s first ever poem-thing.