Cantor Dust

Patterns of weather
Like the bark on a tree,
Like lichen boulders tumbled in glacial landscape,
Like swallows scattering over the fields...
Inside the beehive,
I live the unpredictable,the irregular,
The tiniest factors
Coalescing in each act.
The universe exploding,expanding,
Swirling gases and star fields,
Ever more detailed the closer you peer...
And,as twin foetuses grow in the womb,
The cells migrate into different patterns,
So alike,yet distinct...
Another leaf is dropping into the stream,
A pebble starts to roll, an avalanche triggered...
The branching of a fern
And the shape of a thunderstorm
Dance in the cracking of ice on the springtime river....
I hold up my hand
And it turns into a shark’s fin,
An oriole’s wing,
A feather.
The transformer is transformed,
As one word is changed in the poem,
One brushstroke on the canvas.
Monstrous grace of the furiously inelegant!
The rhythms of enzymes and viruses,
The actions of the brain,
The dizzy percolation of rain through rock,
Microscopic macrocosmic beauties,
Endless forms recurring and transmuting,-
Lunatic world- delight,
Irregular as a ginger root!
See the compositions of starfish,
Washed up on the shore
By fabulous chance.
Here,in my niche,
My opportunity for evolution,
I revel in geological folds of time,
Sine curves of emotion.
Minute as a mite in a bee’s trachea,
I linger in the jagged ragged world.
How many grains can one add to the sandpile
Before it collapses with a sigh?
What happens on the moons of Jupiter
Happens in my front room;
It is all such fun,
Collapsing neutron stars spinning madly,
Supernovas bursting like spider eggs full of new stars,
Suns vomiting magnetic storms across the void...
From the coasts of my mind
I can see the deadly ocean,
All maelstroms,wrecks and ghosts ships sailing by.
I was born to curving country roads
And crumpled hills.
The progress of a forest fire
Or disease through an apple orchard-
Bizarre wonders branch into the eye
And out through the fingertips.
Dark swarms of prisms whirl through me,
Egyptian pyramids of love and fire;
Moonrise finds me skulking
Like a scorpion under a touchstone.
A seed crystal is falling through the atmosphere,
Its hexagon growing at the dizzy boundary,
Combining chaos and order in flight.
Frankenstein’s monster of time and weather,
I plunge into the badlands,
Happy as the spiral in a firefly’s eye,
Noting the whorls and scrolls
Of chemical reactions,
The first signs of life on earth.
Heart attacks,tsunamis, a sudden waterspout erupting
From still seas,-from an absolute coalescence
Of conditions, the unforeseen arrives,
Storming the fortress of the blind.
The crossroads calls me to its gallows-
Which way now?