Critical Terms in the Atmospheric Sciences
Troy Sherman
Volume One, Issue One, “Atmosphere,” Poetry
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”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”)
Low-Collisionality Regime: vide supra.
(But inverted.)
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.
❃ ❃ ❃
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.