poem about atmosphere
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Poem — “ Layers of The Atmosphere ”
Poem, February 2019
by Chris Stewart
*****
To begin with, there is a weighted and lush fog
It is cast across the way
Edge to edge
It is highest above the poles
It turns slightly throughout each day
But then often becomes concerned with what it finds and turns right back
It’s name being: Troposphere
Troposphere is where the last things that dead animals and plants say, drift up
To walk around it, one becomes confused and sad
All the air that can be found says it’s ending, it’s ending
Or my groceries, my laundry or I did not think it would be like this
Air to be gulped with hesitance, embarrassment
Heavy cloak, full of clouding and streaking
So much water in silent, changing blocks
Battalions of clouds
Anchors of rain
Great soaked floors giving way like collapsed roofs
Torrents of weather come down
*****
Stratosphere is mighty, above Tropo, very cold, very light,
Muchly empty
No weather is made there, no great thing cooked or combined
Very cold, very sparse, very dearthish very un, very not,
No starches teasing with their glycosidic bonds
No chains of linked things
No this and that needing each other
No basis of further and future something
Expansive and powerful Strato is very strong and angry
Lets no wasting foolish life within its crisp and murkless bounds
With life comes murk
No murk is here, here is stratospheric expanse
Long, ice-flat roofs of pooling and spreading pressures
Low, slick, widening floors of ultraviolet warmth pressing down on
Captured glaciers of ozone, drifting subsurface, always beneath the beneath
*****
Next and above is the place where light and fire and streams of streaking ghostly light
Occur
This is the mesosphere, a trapping-place, where many phenomena are at home
And where the sun’s light, though it has fallen below the horizon on earth, can still
Strike up great streaking clouds
And those below can see them, Noctilucent Beings
Like the long branching arms of a mesospheric jelly swimmer
And there are electrical events and the striking to light of dusts and ices
And there is the flaring up of other frozen things
There is a question of how any dust is there are all
Some from volcanoes, which can cast very high, and some from meteors, broken and
Spread across the cold, billowing, luminous frozen Mesopia
*****
Now to the vasty deeps
High, high up where the air is rarified, in the scientific sense,
So divided and wide-flung that a molecule of oxygen
Might search across a great length of Thermosphere just to find another
Here it is hot and unguarded, waterless, dustless, undecaying, weatherless
Tall, so tall, kilometres and kilometres of pure upwards-extending space
It is dark and sometimes blooms borealic, astralic — this is where these
Towers of light exist
They need no water
Thermo is hungry and eats the tall, tall dark
And is the tall, towering place herself
*****
Lastly there is the exosphere
Exo, what are you?
I am full of chaos and burning molecular disturbances
This is where the sun can touch the earth
Her long-traveling caress
Exo, I am, and I am a great and final band of emptiness above the world
Where charged particles rush and swoon
Across great scapes of darkness over the curving, coloured cloak beneath
My lower cousins
I am above and to them I might as well be the empty dark
But I am not
Only a veil where solar winds break against me and diffuse in my
Broad, long gasp of a place
Exo, am I
Abovest
Least to the eye
A great searing shock to the touch
I could bring death itself
For a moment
- Green column, red column, tail and notch, the falling titan’s breath of the auroras -