Sestina for a Neuron

The sestina began in the 12th century by the troubadours as a poetic form celebrating courtly love. It is attributed to the the Provencal troubadour Arnaut Daniel. The Neuron was discovered in the 19th century by a few minds but credited to mainly to a Spaniard named Santiago Ramón y Cajal who won the 1906 Nobel in medicine with Camillo Golgi.
 

Sestina for a Neuron

even stillness involves so many instances of signal

synaptic sojourn of sense of body electric

dendritic pathways aft & fore though not by wood these branches

if merely one pulse of think you thought then inside a cell

imprisoned there to never blink blue eyes, smell clipped grass; carry

yourself across the bridge upon these many millions of firing feet of nerve

backbone, boldness, fortitude & pluck a turn of nerve

the audacity of a thirsting body & then quiet, stealthy signal

those lightning channels open & close to carry

the balance it takes to stand the swoon of blooming cherry branches

our unlike anybody-elseness built upon the backs of one cell

after the other holding fast in unseeable & seeming dark under-flash electric

if we are but only these pieces & parts, particles charged electric

then by fragment & fleck might we find our face or the nerve

to find that freedom is not outside our cell

but within it; while these reaches to distant dying stars as signal

to the sky to reveal itself for the anatomy of life only forks & branches

the root is ever traceable, take your hand toward the Sun let it carry

you back; to atomics & everafter then the way the pain will carry

itself along having began perhaps in the hand or heart electric

lines laid down, up, like limbs of trees sense the sky with its branches

light, pressure of eagle’s eyrie, prick of pin or break of heart from nerve

to nerve until we know it hurts. react. halt. heed. send a signal

what we mean when we say ouch begins with a single cell

O soma O axon O neuron; how do we know thee cell?

are you not every word heard, bird seen, song we carry

through the thick & fragrant air a smoke signal

of life stretches out a travel under skin an electric

impulse through bone, muscle, organ, brought to life by the nerve

ever reaching out O little fingers of the branches

to sense, then to move, we animated & too like branches

sway outstretched at either end; how meager then the merely cell

its neural image found in gardens green deciduous et al our nature’s nerve

a fecund forest found to be then how the earth may carry

all that’s sensed & all that’s seen and even here electric

this ball of blue itself alive with anatomic signal

it were no dream this symmetry of branches, nor of carry

out across the cell divides a sign or impulse signal

for all that lives knows nerve enough imbued with life electric