Islands (Invaginated by Saltwater
Bays with a Stream and Another Both Flowing
All Through Them along Enfolded Paths)
Every bit
lies on the border of three countries,
is a 3-country corner.
Swamp, as it stands
between the land and the water, delta drained by a river-
tree, water/water-shed.
Properties of parts?
Or their articulation: Eiffel Tower
airy strong, keys of strength in the branch points.
Worn away, like coral,
like reef.
So
entirely worn
that body vanishes, all innerness outerness: rules
invent this
on the plane, in space.
Mandelbrot . . . not want to waste any data,
plotted all we had. Distressing.
Our eyes—
we found it hard to discriminate landscapes
we knew to be significantly
different . . . . We should have
remembered . . . to assess motion,
one needs rest . . . . One needs that standard
and the same is true of roughness.
Every bit
on 3 frontiers: on the banks of the branchy
Bronchiole, the swollen Artery
and that bluest, darkest
river, Vein.
Publishing Information
- Mandelbrot language in italics is from The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit B. Mandelbrot (Freeman, 1982). Sentences have been excerpted and slightly paraphrased.
Art Information
- “Single Wave” © Niels Langeveld; used by permission.
Stephanie Strickland has published eight books of print poetry, among them True North and Dragon Logic. Her latest, V : WaveTercets / Losing L’una, is accompanied by the Vniverse app for iPad, created with Ian Hatcher. She has collaborated on ten digital poems, most recently House of Trust and Hours of the Night. A member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, she coedited Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1.
For more information about her work, see Stephanie Strickland’s website.
Stephanie will read at TW's panel “Wild Equations: A Math Poetry Reading” for the AWP 2016 conference in Los Angeles.
This poem appeared in an earlier version in Zone : Zero (Ahsahta Press, 2008).
