Anu Rains

By Lynne Alsford

FISH IS BRAIN FOOD

Einstein's brain is kept in a jar
swims in liquid
like the fish
he must have eaten
to make his cortex swell.
His rapidly multiplying
schools of neurons
spread their ganglia and
knitted themselves into theories on
quantum physics and relativity.

Was Einstein a poached haddock man:
square meals and plain tastes,
materials with which his brain constructed
the fundamentals of logic?
Or were his tastes exotic
generating complex cells of creativity
from plates of wine-marinated swordfish,
Coquilles St.-Jacques,
fish provençale?

I think of his shaggy head over a bowl of fish bouillabaise
his hair a mass of swimming sea worms
divining that

 
    e = mc², where:

         e = eel
          m = mackeral
          c = cod.

The stars in his grey universe flicker
send particles of light out in waves.
Streams of photon salmon
striving to reach the beginning and end of everything
bend in the gravity of his celestial thoughts.

 

¥

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