Brain Songs
From the ‘Author’s Note’:
‘This book stems from the insights of neuroscientists who have conveyed “the splendours of the human brain” in a language comprehensible to one whose normal reading is poetry. Eric R Kandel, V S Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks and numerous others repeatedly remind us that such science is at a very early stage and that it could bring as many dangers as, right now, it brings benefits. What we know so far, and I am able to understand, reads like a first gloss on what poets have tried to hold true to for centuries.
With the confidence of possessing such ancestors, I have taken the liberty of letting the imagination play upon the scientists’ profound discoveries in a sequence of ‘songs’: a cumulative work, which builds an overall narrative. Walter Benjamin wrote, in 1936, that ‘The Storyteller’ is someone “who has counsel for his readers…counsel which is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.” It is in that spirit that these poems are offered.’
This, the fourth of Graham’s Villa Vic publications, has a wood engraving by Chris Daunt and a cover design from an embroidery by Trude Schwab, and is published in a limited, numbered edition of 200 copies and a specially bound edition of 20 copies, signed by the author and the artist. The poems first appeared, in a slightly different form, in Polish translation, in ‘Nowe Wiersze’ (Terytoria, Gdańsk 2014).
I really do not think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.
Wittgenstein
…if you remember anything of this book, it will be because your brain is slightly different after you have finished reading it.
Eric R Kandel
***
Michelangelo
cradled all day
like a bobbin
in the great machine
of the Sistine Chapel ceiling
God’s finger pointing
Adam’s ready to receive
left that precious gap
between them
the first synapse
between the outstretched finger
and the angled hand
ready to take in and pass on
what happens next
all the lightnings of creation
great volcanoes spewing fire
and long slow lives of oceans
found this small space to live in –
our version of the story
we have fruit-flies tell us now
and Aplysia the sea-slug annotates
with us at the keyboard
***
out of our senses
we can see
the last gold leaves
of the lime tree
as the first shoots of spring
can hunt out something burning
before we have moved
the toppling hyacinth
out of our room
can sit truly agog
at the steering wheel
of our father’s first new car
having smelt new leather
and touching the skin
along her shoulders
as the sun lands there
can taste the first peach
we never ate
but watched dripping
in the hands of a small child
twenty years before
***
off Sherbro Island
fishermen
cast their nets
like grain
on still waters
each diamond
of sunlight
caught there
for one moment
then exchanged
for fish
nearby
at Bunce Fort
I find fragments
of clay pipe
still in the battlements
left by my ancestors
as they passed the time
watching for a ship
or thinking of home perhaps
with a slave-compound
behind them
had they just an inkling
even the slightest inkling
and did it take so long
to even start to understand
Recording: from Brain Songs
