Where the Brain’s Close to Leaves

James Grabill

The human brain handed down to us sees it can’t stop working.
It suffers with this existence and the shock of consciousness.
At the brain’s center, dawn burns, indelible, indivisible, a flame
for the self, light for the neocortical eye in 3-D projection rooms
where holographic representations correspond with the world.
Waking takes precedence, for this incarnation may not be followed
by another, as impossible as being someone then nothing may seem.
The brain grew out in roundness where there’s always a next thing,
something more to learn, while the instant’s given a possible future.
What eludes the united grasp can be more difficult or easy to forget
than shades of emerald presence in leaves making a place to go
in the afternoon, in cases of hope swallowed by cosmic vastness.