..[Listen below]
Pattern Language
I take the sidewalk a step at a time,
shards of its exposed aggregate form archipelagos,
and there’s Jesus in a cloud, or is it Lao Tzu
explaining Is without a word
Deep clefts in the bark of a tree just passed
define the humps of Appalachians.
I saw Scranton strewn along a gully on the lichen side
of the fat trunk of a sugar maple when I glanced
A net of angst chokes a birch in the side yard
of a small house, but it’s just Bittersweet being a garrote.
Its hot orange berries are incendiary cherries.
Its network of vine is untamed thought
A wall of desiccated siding, its south face
so in need of paint some of it is dust
some parched raised grain, is the surface of Mars.
What’s left of its spent red pigment
is the feel of utter space
Hairline cracks in river ice in the dam pond
are rifts of splintered glass silvered on one side
full of mere reflections falling to the sea
A crow measures distance between
gutter pebbles with her beak
aligning as if she were a smart array of atoms
laying out the footings of a house or universe
The patterns in her brain must be
the forms she seeks
.
Jim Culleny
1/2/17.