A Model for the Destruction of Hard Things

A woman studying the fracture properties

of coconuts may insist that nature

breaks its own structures reluctantly, along fault lines

of hard resin on fibrous interiors. 

She might apply that principle to apples,

animal horns and wood,

profile a pineapple so that she might

learn something about destruction.

You stand alone at the edge of ice, push

a half-submerged tree branch deeper into a hole.

Your branch a lever, the entire frozen pond reacts:

you recognize, (with iterations!) Mandelbrot sets

forming across its surface.  It crackles

loudly beneath you, obeying symmetry,

brokenness: illusions begin

to thaw as water seeps into lines from below.

Coconuts have nothing to do with ice.  Levers

do not determine fault lines.  The sound of wood

splitting has nothing to do with the smell

of a forest in January.  Wait.  Apples just might

have everything to do with a pond in winter.  I’m suggesting:

a woman in a lab, chiseling antlers to celebrate

breaking, has everything to do with you

standing in the cold wood, holding a tree branch.

--First published in Fourth River, Autumn 2011