Fractalization by Laura Foley

Because I heard the wind

blowing through the sun,

I left the lecture on mathematics,

found myself scaling a mountain,

so I could see beyond

the limits of my mind

numbed by numbers,

but was stopped by an old birch

crashing across my path—

its limbs and crown

bouncing a little, before settling.

Was this a sign, perhaps,

that I shouldn’t have left?

The expert is my friend, after all,

teaching patterns of numbers,

energy and fractals,

how full we are of space.

This I heard from her lips,

before the wind called me out

and nearly hit me, but I stepped over

the fallen birch,

like a comrade in subtraction.

When I reached the summit,

I saw my geometry

multiplied in the whole

of the world below,

holograms of my deepest space.

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Laura Foley is the author of six poetry collections, including, most recently, WTF and Night Ringing. Her poem “Gratitude List” won the Common Good Books poetry contest and was read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. Her poem “Nine Ways of Looking at Light” won the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest, judged by Marge Piercy. A palliative care volunteer in hospitals, with an M.A. and a M. Phil. in English Lit. from Columbia University, she lives with her partner and their two dogs among the hills of Vermont.