One day she brought in something special:
"This is the human brain."
It was the color of wet clay,
webbed with tattered membranes.
It trembled on the metal tray.
This, then, was the miracle
of thought. Mother prodded it
with a glass rod.

Cats', rabbits', and goats' brains
were the brains of the day.
Hypothalamus was a household word.
I hardly noticed, but a friend
almost fainted once
when Mother passed through the room
in a white coat,
carrying a brain-cutting saw
like an avenging angel.

I liked the Gothic
armature of labs,
the dark hush,
the red warning lamps;
anatomy sketches
scribbled over in Latin,
names of clouds and stars,
of genus and species.
I sat on the windowsill,
four flights above sad Warsaw,
blessing flat Socialist rooftops:
Paramecium caudatum.

Oscillographs clicked,
spinning green sinusoids.
Sagittal cross-sections
cluttered up our groceries
behind the steel claws of cold storage.
I leafed through foreign
neurology journals,
a word-eating larva, waiting
to become a butterfly, methyl blue,
pinned in the heaven of science.