My great-grandfather held a brain and studied it for signs of music.
Like all the men in my family, he was a close reader and musician.
The day the KGB arrived to take him, his students misplaced
the combination to the ether closet. I see him in the armamentarium
choosing between scalpels and scopes, escaping across
the Carpathians in peasant's clothes. True, he did not love the state,
a symphony full of poorly written solos. But he could hold a brain
more steady than any in the University, interrogate its perilous
longitudes, cardinal directions for taste and melancholy, yellow tulips,
joy. I see him peeling back the hair, that quiet, necessary artifice,
to reveal a nesting doll of impulses, then reciting the cold, hard rain
of these connections at conferences in Cambridge. A halo of stage
whispers as he came as close to candor with the mind as was possible.
He understood the officer's parietal lobe where his punishment
waited to be articulated, its obstinacy illustrated in early phrenology
by the silhouette of a ram. Always the doctor's burden to reason
with that which cannot easily be reasoned. I see him make the first
incision, certain, gentle as a breaststroke in the Black Sea. He knew
how to tell the brain a story, listen when told one in return. Knew
that engine of ephemera could be a sentencing, a silence or a song.
From The Hippocrates Prize 2015: The Winning and Commended Poems, selected by T Dalrymple, R Gross, F Oyebode and S Rae, eds MW Hulse & DRJ Singer. The Hippocrates Press, 2015. © Maya Catherine Popa. Reprinted with permission.
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