Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brain, connection, memory, neurons, poem, poetry, synapse on August 27, 2018| Leave a Comment »
We are perhaps like neurons
that never touch—
but that doesn’t stop
the chemical buzz,
the lightning charge,
the electric thrill
that leaps the gap—
and in that span
all meaning is made,
long red ropes of memory
twisting and knotting,
braiding, unbraiding,
and nothing
is ever the same.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, brain, flight, memory, poem, poetry on November 3, 2016| 2 Comments »
Somewhere in the 100 billion cells
of my brain is the memory
of the playground in second grade
when Jenny told me birds could fly
because their bones were hollow,
and, she reasoned, if we could lose
enough weight, we, too,
could have hollow bones, and we, too
could fly.
Surely linked to that memory
are thousands of other neurons
that disprove her claim—
neurons related to air pressure, thrust,
strong breast muscles, osteoporosis—
but there is, perhaps,
still one cell in there somewhere
across the synaptic gap,
that lights up at the memory
of Jenny’s suggestion
as if to say,
wow, that’s cool,
let’s try it.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brain, connection, poem, poetry, scarecrow on March 19, 2016| 6 Comments »
I, too, wish to confer with the flowers.
I, too, wish to consult with the rain,
but I have spent so many years
learning that I’ve lost the ability
to speak and listen in these natural tongues.
Today I sat beside an old spruce tree
for an hour and never understood
what it had to tell me. I tried.
Perhaps that is the problem, the trying.
I don’t know how to do it any other way.
Oh Scarecrow, I know too much.
Me and all my certainties. I’ve made walls
out of what I took as wisdom, and now
I cannot see around them. I made
stories out of facts and histories, and now
I cannot hear the spruce. I can barely
hear my own wild heart as it shouts
in some strange language I have
filed away or perhaps I never knew?
Oh this brain, how it costumes
everything else into terms of risks,
probabilities and rules.
How I long to listen clearly
to the flowers, to the rain,
to my heart, to the spruce.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brain, evolution, housefly, instinct, poem, poetry on February 21, 2015| 3 Comments »
The deep similarities we see between how our brains and those of insects regulate behavior suggest a common evolutionary origin. It means that prototype brain circuits, essential for behavioral choice, originated very early and have been maintained across animal species throughout evolutionary time.
—Frank Hirth, Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London, reported in Science
Sometimes there’s a twitching,
a rapid rubbing of the hands,
a longing to hang out
in the corner of the room,
an impulse to taste
whatever is left
on the counter,
this instinct
to be close to you,
no matter how many times
you shoo me
away.
after Fugu, by D.R. Goodman
