Friday Poem: "Percolation Network"

For a long while I was kind of obsessed with the concept of fractal geometry; not that I had or have any idea what the math actually looks like or how it operates, but from the books I read about it, fractals felt like the most poetic field in math. I initially began to investigate fractals when I began work on Ammonite, my PhD dissertation, because the thin walls that divide the chambers of an ammonite's spiral shell tended toward fractal patterns as new species evolved over the eons.

This poem's title comes from another fractal concept that aims to model phenomena like water or oil seeping through rock. One night when I was cooking spaghetti (and burned myself twice) the phrase leapt to mind and this poem happened.

Percolation Network

1.  Test the Bite

You puff steam,
boiling water spills past your lips
from the shell’s fleshy cup,
raising tastebuds like stubble grass
along the edge of a placid pond,
the rest of your tongue 
snail-smooth on your palate.  

Your wooden spoon presides 
over the Mandelbrot figure
of white foam that erupts 
in the circulating noodles: 
you stir, it blooms again,
like a time-lapse spray of baby’s breath.

Your tongue rasps under your teeth, feline.  
Now you know what nothing tastes like.

2.  Drain, Serve   

Later, pull the pot from the flame’s
squat blue anemone, tentacles
waving.  The loose handle
slipping through your right-hand clutch, 
you steady it with a bare left:
a slosh and all the dinner’s in the sink.

Such distances: package to plate,
stove to colander, fingertip
to spinal cord.  You’re red-handed.  

But there’s a stillness after a burn,
ice trickling down your forearm,
slow as February.
You feel the pressure but not the surface.
How easily confused your senses are.

Your identifying marks
melted smooth, a white blister bubbles
in the scarlet print of your ring finger:
topographic edge, aerial view,
with peninsulas and archipelagos.
No way of knowing now,
nor in that scalding moment,
what will hold together
and what will raise and burst and tear away.

This poem originally appeared in the chapbook Techniques of Avalanche Survival: Poems.