Sometimes writers invent new word uses just out of the blue.
This is on page 109 of Richard Ford's Canada:
'my mother...observed that the air had a seam of cold in it now'
This might be the first time since the Big Bang that seam is used that way.
If you're thinking of "seam" as a place where two pieces of cloth are stitched together, yes. Â But I'll bet the person who first said that had in mind a thin layer, as of some mineral squeezed between two strata under the earth (as in "a seam of coal"). Â Actually that's not a bad metaphor.
And doesn't look offhand or accidental either, because it appears again on page 114, like establishing precedent or something.
From Harper's Magazine, about 1879:
"In each case an unfriendly seam of cold water, working down from the far north, intervenes between the land and the warm sea current."
Thanks dilettante. Now I have a brand new entry in my mind dictionary, because from how it's been used, that word is not even exclusively poetic let alone exotic, though arguably it swims very sparingly in the main currents of literature, an elusive time skipping thing that makes itself known and dives under radar like a kind of linguistic seam it is.