Eric Sean Rawson, Skatepark (photograph)
Entangled in the electromagnetic field
around a human heart,
fate changes its shape recursively.
I learned in childhood
how destiny turns on tiny things,
cracks in the sidewalk, sticks and stones,
apparitions fulfilling the promise
of fundamental symmetry.
It takes an eye for pattern
to see the way the soothsayer sees,
or Mandelbrot, his fractal designs
carving the limits of space.
Galaxies swirl in a teacup,
animals run through pixilated clouds,
new universes like fictions arise
not out of emptiness, but how it's filled
with gravestones and doxologies—
ghost of Grandma P everywhere I look
exhorting me to trust in Jesus,
lorem ipsum of my soul’s erratic geometry.