The architect of snow and stone

sculpts crystals into single perfect snowflakes

her solstice-gifts to eye and heart.

Her lenses are chill and crisp:

contact-correction to prisms' paradigm,

orienting souls to the slow creep of crystal-growth,

the angled jewels of cooling liquid.

Sublime; shattered in all shards,

ever absent from the moss-cushioned world,

she seeks not the rounded rock-runs left for lichen,

the great glassine groove-paths from gliding glaciers.

For her there are only all the ices, condensing:

the endless play of methane on nitrogen,

ammonia on water, crinkled carbonised crust,

limpid layers in diffuse depths, tints revealed

in the pale offerings of a day-distant Sun.

For those who visit, staying half an orbit,

she folds kindness into a viewpoint:

origami-intricate flowers of fractal petals

blooming into blackness under slow cosmic-ray rain.

They blossom fresh as frost-numbed pain

only once the world's atmosphere snows out again.