To whom is the cheetah being obedient
as she strangles a young impala, or
for that matter a tundra wolf pack, when it
singles out the winter-wearied caribou?

Apparently, it all boils down to the design
of snowflakes, and broccoli, and lightning,
to a universe following mathematical laws,
an order in the mind of its Creator.

Though the paisley fractal graphs
magnified into endless, so named
valleys of sea horses and elephants, at first
seem more akin to images from acid rock
than they do to anything divine.

We’re told how our physical reality
of crystals and clouds is merely mimicking
the secret, abstract beauty in numbers,
that 7 can never be anything but 7
in a realm of transcendent truths.

Even more dizzying than Fibonacci’s
golden numbers explaining the spiraling
of florets in sunflowers and the symmetry
of Italian sonnets, is z_n + 1 = z_n² + c,
c being the number evaluated and z
a sequence generated by the formula.

Of course, didn’t Plato say back in B.C.—
which is also before computers—that God
always geometrizes? Complex doesn’t even
begin to describe how each number in the set,
such as -1, -½, and 0, is made of these
surreal shapes looking somewhat
like silhouettes of quickening organs

that could be kidneys, or lungs,
or a brain perhaps, but each being eternally
attached to smaller and smaller and smaller
duplicates of itself, like those infinity mirror effects
where we’ll be able to see the piebald radiance
of magpies so long as a world exists, or simply
put: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Artwork by Binette228 / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).