Spring Nerve Sheath
April 26th, 2007
Spring’s here and the trees are budding.
All winter the skinny branches, dendrite-dense,
scratched the dry air.
All winter the trees were naked neurons,
buzzing softly,
just shy of hearing,
popping and crackling,
lifting the hair on my arms.
All these synapses firing,
from tree to tree to tree,
but no reflex movement,
no flexed muscle,
no spasming limb.
All that electric sensitivity
and no ability to express.
Or is that wrong?
Is it that on some plane beyond sense
these branches,
analogues to the axons
inside us,
most sensitive when winter-dead,
their nerves bare to the air –
on some plane do they jerk and twitch
and seize and flex and jump?
We don’t intersect with this plane.
If we did,
the parts of our minds
which extend just enough into it
to witness this private act
would be branch-lashed
to bloody blindness.
