Craquelure

It’s almost always deciduous
Winter among the arboreal
Figures of branching phenomena.

The sentence-trees of grammarians,
Family trees of genealogies,
Even Darwin’s twiggy tree of life

Are all bare. To labor over leaves,
In addition to sheer tedium
Would imply a kind of fruition,

A completion of the incomplete
Branching that inspired the metaphor.
Nerve-cell synapses would be better,

But they were discovered late and made
Figurative trees themselves—dendrites
The medical Latin for branches.

Fractures would take us far from the trees
And lose the organic suggestion
Of preordained unfolding in growth.

Speciation splits like craquelure.
Ancestry’s a series of ruptures.
Sentences are shatterproof windshields

Stove in just enough to be lacy
With complex patterns tracing impacts
From whatever crashed into the mind.