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 -