What Is Frost?

Just look at what frost can do

How casually we talk of awe

If everything is awesome, nothing is

We do not need a word if another will do just as well

The word’s meaning depends upon two things:

Wonder and terror

How terrifying is that plate of nachos?

Terror is profound, bone shaking fear

How much wonder, that is, a sort of ecstatic incredulity

At how right, or good, or true something or someone is

Does that second margarita cause you to experience?

Think carefully; results may vary

So, if something or someone is awesome

If we pay the slightest attention to the meaning of the word

That means that the other party moves you

Simultaneously, mind you, i.e., both effects at once

To experience wonder, and terror

Isn’t this kind of experience rare, and precious, and worthy of respect?

Should we throw around its name with such blasphemous abandon?

Can you blaspheme against something invisible?

There’s a puzzle

Contemplate the complete, nuanced world the frost conjured on that windowpane

We might have it wrong, when we talk of “natural wonders”

Or the phrase is too shopworn and threadbare to be taken seriously

One of Orwell’s verbal false limbs

We might be looking at these things in an old, foolish way

“Look at that,” we say to ourselves or aloud, “that’s quite something!”

Or, “It looks like someone did that!” with dumbfounded amazement

I think we ought to rearrange some of these elements

If we wish to reclaim the idea waiting to be recognized

Behind the mob of tired, tedious, familiar words

So close to us that they are really illegible

We ought, perhaps, to say to ourselves

Aloud, or in the privacy of our own minds

“Look at that! No one did that!”

We are only readers of the frost

No one could possibly write that way

Because there is nothing it is like to be the frost

It begs to be anthropomorphized

By our fear and our vanity

If this can be done without us

How trivial are we?

Terrifying!

But of course, as you read the frost

And see the skeletons of ancient sea creatures

Or the genetic code of a yeti

Or a manuscript written by bitterly cold water

Or a hydrangea perfumed, riotous garden, from above

Know that this process is inexhaustible

Your eyes are changing—that is time’s work

Your mind is busy building itself out of your life

Every time you look at the frost

It is for the first time

For the person you are at the moment

Who you were not a moment ago

And will not be by the time you reach

The end of a line, or a paragraph, or a single

Frosted windowpane

Wonderful!

Awesome phenomena are ubiquitous

In the world without us

If we pay attention

Of course, that means they come to be without our help

Perhaps art is just our pathetic attempt

To compete with everything

Wonderful and terrible

We cannot take credit for

There is such a surplus of wonderful, terrible meaning

In the world that has nothing to do with human beings

That it will occasionally show itself

As water, freezing, on something we made

But hold on

It cannot be read by human eyes and minds

Without us

Only a human being

Can offer a human response

When someone, or something

Wonderful and terrible

Appears