Brain to Heart, Creeds to Visions - By Mara Lemanis

 

 

Brain to Heart, Creeds to Visions

In the wheelhouse of the mind
stray thoughts careen
around my restless brain
knock at the Buddha patience of my heart —
they have no mass, no spin, no thrust
they’re free to roam, frolic,
tap out algorithms, redundant codes
borrowed from a trust fund in my skull
of worn inheritance, auld acquaintance;
or did some towering stellar phoenix
disgorge them
to feed the brains
and hearts of
children of the Earth?

The brain goes on about its primacy
hustling the heart to its preserve
it sparks stale doctrines
entropic oats of its prestige;
from Holocene spores
it swaggers over fossil fuels and nuclear lusts
the great collisions of its great collider
its chemical bonds and bombs
and how it routed cyber space.
It’s the proud creator of gospel contradictions
it swears “I strike my enemies”
it swears “I stoke my friends”
and stakes religious credos to my heart
asserting primacy of first perception
genius to polar instincts
love and fear
where fear breaks off from love
girds to tongues of wrath
rushes over ragged cliffs
and falls forever down as rot
rotting without end
inside a sewage ditch…

The brain is not the heart
that quick of thought
the brain proclaims it owns.
My heart is not a hunter.
It is a wide receiver
without defense
catching lobs — electric beams
that dart against my open kiln
that pumps them off into a wilderness
where dust clouds shimmer into planets
within the majesty of Mother Mind.
They pitch beyond the skull’s tight payload
endowing second sight
endowing natal eyes with unseen sights —
brave plumes of toucans and macaws
feasting on Antarctica;
rain trees on Callisto,
greening Jupiter’s hurt moon;
rainbows blooming on Earth’s moon;
on Mars deer drinking out of sylvan streams;
and Earth’s magnetic field
birthing a corona
as we ripen into sunbursts
morph into architects of vulcan deeps
calderas harvesting the plasma of stars.

What does the heart know
before the brain ransacks it?
What does it hear
from the wilderness the ear shuts down
what does it see
from the luminous chambers
the diaphanous membrane
of God’s great nautilus
Mother of galaxies
coming in and going out
coming to be and not to be
being born and being done
through the dark in the day
through the light in the night…

Mara Lemanis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mara Lemanis

Biography: Mara Lemanis is a literary scholar. Her essays have been selected for 20th CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM and are included in undergraduate student textbooks in the U.S.

She has worked as an archivist for Historical Preservation and with the IRC, assisting refugees in Oakland, California.