Strange Attractor
“Strange Attractor” by Michael R. Clark is the second runner-up of the 2026 Nature Poetry Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn. We’re honored to share this stirring poem with you.
A galaxy of midges percolates over a summer meadow:
let your eye try to pick and follow one sunlit speck.
Your orbits will soon burn from tracing the groove
infinity—infinity—infinity—
The fly’s flight path a toppled 8, an unflapped moth,
two loops burgeoning outward from a point
like a diagram of your life: everything past
funneling into now, from which everything future
will inflate, or at least wants to. Want,
the way a high school chemistry teacher will fudge explaining
the tendency of some atoms to form ions—
“because the electrons want to complete the outer shell.”
Thoughtless, the feather-crowned insect pulls and drifts in the breeze,
wings whining at a thousand beats per second:
the grain of muscle at the base of each wing
the most active tissue in the animal kingdom.
It fixates on a fencepost or tussock or even you,
the way a landscape painter thumbs the horizon
for perspective, circulating around that point,
never drifting far. No one’s sure why.
As the sun sets, the bright motes haze the sweetgrass and timothy,
like unshelled souls crowding a lie,
one that rings pure like a struck tuning fork
singing return, return, return—
But by now you’re crosseyed. Give it up. Seek
that maypole in the air where the insect wove its ribbon.
Let your stillness depend upon it, and spread your arms in the golden light,
as if that point, invisible even to the gnat, were crucial.