Science as Poetry

A scientific marvel, the process of DNA methylation in neurons plays a crucial role in memory formation and storage, influencing how synaptic connections are first established and later reinforced. Although this esoteric process might seem outright incredible to non-neurobiologists, in “A Blessing for Methylation,” the ingenuity of poetry becomes a useful entrée into grasping it. The brilliant opening couplet “memory/is physical” immediately bridges what might at first seem a yawning chasm between intangible humanity and hard science. The simplicity and elegance of the language throughout the poem evoke the fundamentally logical nature of the biochemical reactions that give rise to memory; the short lines with their frequent enjambment further contribute to an appreciation of the stepwise fashion in which such reactions occur. The poem also imparts a more ethereal sense of how such scientific mechanisms are translated into the wonder of our ability to remember, the last lines at once continuing the enacted metaphor of molecule-by-molecule, brick-by-brick building while surprising us with a luminous recollection of the speaker, a concrete neural product that seemingly miraculously transcends time. “… I/see my hand in/your hair again//not grey and wiry/but golden — it holds/the light like the sky//holds summer stars” arises from the cellular basis of neural plasticity evinced, surely, but also as a summative expression of a design even more astonishing and grand.