ODE TO CRYSTALLIZATION The atom is a crystal of a sort; the lattices its interlockings form lend a planarity most pleasing to the abysses and cliffs, much magnified, of (for example) salt and tourmaline. Arise, order, out of necessity! Mock, you crystals, with all appearance of chiselled design, our hope of a Grand Artificer. The graceful, layered frost-ferns the midnight elves left on the Shillington windowpanes for my morning astonishment were misinformation, as is the glittering explosion of tinted quartz discovered in earth like a nugget of thought, buried evidence crying out for release to the workman's pick, tangled hexagonal hair of an angel interred where it fell, our earth still molten, in the Fall. When, on those anvils at the center of stars, and those even more furious anvils of the exploding supernovae, the heavy elements were beaten together to the atomic number of 94 and the crystalline metals with their easily lost valence electrons arose, their malleability and conductivity made Assyrian goldsmithing possible, and most of New York City. Stendhal thought that love should be likened to a bare branch crystallized by a winter in the depths of the salt mines of Hallein: "The tiniest twigs, no bigger than a tomtit's claw, are spangled with an infinite number of shimmering, glistening crystals." Our mathematics and hope of Heaven alike look to crystals; their arising, the mounting of molecules one upon the other, suggests that inner freezing whereby inchoate innocence compresses a phrase of art. Music rises in its fixed lattices and its cries of aspiration chill our veins with snowflakes of blood; the mind grapples up an inflexible relation and the stiff spheres chime --- themselves, the ancients thought, all crystal. In this seethe of hot muck there is something else: the ribs of an old dory emerge from the sand, the words set their bevelled bite on the page, the loved one's pale iris flares in silent assent, the electrons leap, leaving positive ions as the fish scales of moonlight show us water's perfect dance. Steno's Law, crystallography's first: the form of crystal admits no angle but its own. John Updike