Fractal Shadows

Athens, Georgia
March 2, 2015; revised February 2, 2016

Like the jagged spine of the Karakoram
as seen from the heights of Harmukh,
to folds within folds on the face of K2,
indented with valleys of shadow and snow,

creased with ravines and ribbons of ice,
heaped with scree and hills of rubble,
with rills and pores reprising peaks
in the span of the Karakoram.

Like the shoreline of Ireland
from Mizen to Malin, sculpture
of oceans and rain, which whittled
the hills and chiseled the headlands

and carved out Donegal Bay
where inlets and coves
of Killybegs Harbor reprise
the whole shoreline of Éire.

Like profiles of mountains
and coastlines of islands, the glories
of nature and goodness of God -
our souls project a fractal shadow.

So render your day in a tiny diary,
a year in an honest Christmas letter.
Confess your career in a resume.
Draft your own obituary.

We span these scales with a singular flair -
from whispered prayer to epitaph
across the realm, recurrence maps.
The sum of our lives is a fractal affair.

The Julia Set, a fractal

The Sense of Cicada

Athens, Georgia
February 12, 2015

When morning chill
        subsides to day
                soft air will trill
        to waves of cicada
in rhythmic insistence

suffusing the summer
        with resonant tides
                traversing the decades
        to float an old spirit
outside of its time

where evening shadows
       hold an old homestead
               with cabin and garden
        once carved from the forest
by grandfather’s hand.

Out back in the darkness
        young parents and uncles
                with aunties and elders
        are weaving old stories
conversing again

while tucked in the sun-room
        four children are drifting
                in cots become lifeboats
        through open-screen wonder
on currents of love.

Eternity beckons
        as voices are merging
                with swells of cicada
        from forests departed
and family dispersed.

But listen more closely
        within the brief pauses
                a new conversation
        with children now grown
and grandparents gone.

From faraway darkening
        that bleeds through the chasm
                we hear our own voices
        in timorous rhythms
emerging to life.

Perhaps we shall sing
        with the sense of cicada
                that time is illusion
        the earth is our nursery
summer abides.

"Annual Cicada,"
photograph by Bruce Martin