Sublimation
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
In a lab in Minnesota, in what they call
the quietest room in the world, decibels dip
into the negatives, meaning there is minus noise,
there is more than silence, and if, like all people,
you think of noise as water and ice as silence,
that sounds impossible, because there’s no stage
beyond ice or silence, there is no secret third thing
to become, but even as I write this I remember
I’m wrong, I remember reading on an ice sculpting forum
in the early 2000s about a sculptor who checked
on his giant ice-fox the morning before judging
and found its entire tail gone, just turned to vapor,
and could feel the flashing blue crystals of its fur
in every breath, and I remember it’s called sublimation
and it sounds like magic to people, because
when we leave a glass of water out on a table
on a hot day, we expect the water to evaporate
but not the glass or the table, we go through life
with the assumption that solid objects, like towels
or rubies or highways, don’t just turn to vapour,
and so we don’t expect ice to, but it does, it does,
and the reverse is called desublimation,
a gaseous substance turning solid, which is how
clouds turn into snow, or how frost just appears
on leaves in the morning, out of the air itself,
almost like moonlight, and this happens to silence too,
we all know this, you leave something unsaid
before going on holiday and come back
to find a new crystal trinket sitting, so still and solid,
on the kitchen table in the shape of a cocoon, a crown,
something abstract but definitely howling,
and this all has something to do, according to the forum,
with the underlying crystalline structure of ice,
or silence, or all things, I forget, but what I wanted
to say about that room in Minnesota
is that I think every room can be that quiet,
that you can shovel all the noise out of a room and still
keep shoveling, that you can freeze the noise
into a block of silence then chisel that silence
into nothing, and the nothing still needs sculpting.