fractal

Wild persimmon trees grow their summer fruit
out where sweet gums flourish and berries bleed.

The shade and sun and breeze make green patterns
change and change again when you're lying down
and looking up and into and through the leaf maze.
When you're 10, the smells of life are rich, unending.
You don't know your desire, but you're on the way.

You might end up becoming sort of mildly crazy,
if you can't come face to face with a fluid pattern.
Like a fellow stroking the genuine artificial leather
of his burgundy binder holding eccentric stamps.
Those issues from the 1930s...of Greece, Iceland,
Luxembourg, and the very special North Borneos –
so distant and exotic! Thin pieces of postal paper,
of a dear cost. Over pages they scatter their colors,
onto pages of his mind a vague dream is scattered.
An urge has been transformed into a pair of tweezers,
magnifying glass, other paraphernalia for mounting
colored rectangles on white sheets. The penumbra
of a significance become now wispy slices of matter.

Or after years, you are folded, layer on harmonic layer,
into Beethoven string quartets, mirroring the invisible.

Or...you find yourself one far day being absorbed unawares,
piece by granular piece, into subtle photographs of sunsets.
Like those – only those! – that Paula Lietz takes in Canada:
she somehow (is it magic?) captures fissures between forms,
and you feel yourself plummeting into those feathery spaces,
those creases into which the old dream falls, still dreaming....


* * *

It has become oddly dark.
The opium of an old desire
slowly explodes its energy.
A space glows inside space.
The fraction of one neuron
divided by slivers of others
makes an opening to wonder!

The smell of a natural perfume dissolves into eyes,
a thousand crystal eyes, dark-hued, slowly blinking...
The lids of those eyes blink the gradual numerical code
of her fingers – an equation going always to perfect!

All the quiet forms go to depths no god could imagine!
The iteration of feelings have their infinite dimensions.

And the law of entropy makes an arrow of time. No going back
to glue a teacup shattered – the space between shards forever.
As the heart is broken over decades, there will be no repairing
in some future rendezvous, only a falling farther into creases.

And words roll off a silken tongue as arabesques of syllables.
Meanings heard by the ears of neurons, deep inside words,
pieces of sound become soothing lullabies by an unseen voice.
The dark going darker until a dim luminescence must emerge...
becoming slow fireworks of alien colors, or from the hereafter.

A pendulum yearning this way and that, never ceasing motion,
tracing out the values of an algorithm, plot-points unearthly.
And a picture grows, blooming as a Lietz cloud feathering.
The pendulum arcing like a Ouija pointer, pointing a finger
into the great beyond of longing, toward a complexity of hair,
to a face diffuse and fading, then appearing, then fading...
spiraling into whirlpools of tears turning into diamond glints.

It's not happening in the real world. It's in delusion's kaleidoscope,
a lens cut from the blown glass of mineral spirit, aching rotations.

All the days have become sequences of bifurcating rhythms.
All the long days are chlorophyling into veins of reaching leaves.
Engravers cut the whorls of dream onto a stamp's oasis surface.
Madness makes the Grosse Fugue stagger into crippled regions.
Sunsets and dark beneath make pictures havens or a keepsake.

Until...

convergence toward a great horizon line drawn
across the plane distance of elusive destination.
Endlessly, signals are sent and return only echoes
of desiring. Because it's not to be, it becomes all.