A wave by Hiroshige is a fractal.
A weather pattern is a butterfly mask
emerging. A tree iterates a leaf
and vice versa. Magnify one cell
and patterns become evident.
My mother wanted to be a physicist.
She wanted to narrate space,
which is harder than fiction,
or painting or designing a bridge.
She dreamed of blind man’s bluff
with chaos. A physicist is an artist
who observes the night sky to see how
milk-thick stars, their planets,
and the black between them are the same
as what fills a spoon or makes an eyelash.
My mother gave me names for stars
like Vega and Alpha Centauri. “But,” she added,
“the stars that light our nights might long be dead.”
