Gretchen Fletcher – String Poet

SYNAPSES ON THE CEILING

In 1990 a physician named Frank Lynn Meshberger noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the background figures and shapes portrayed behind the figure of God [on the Sistine Chapel ceiling] appeared to be an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain.

Do you remember that moment
when Mind reached out from the hemispheres
with one dendritic finger
to make connection with Man? Sparks fired
across a space
50,000 times as small as a millimeter
and traveled the infinite distance between neurons,
30,000 of which could sit on the head of a pin
like so many angels dancing.
And that frescoed finger of God paused
for just a moment
at the point
of creating an eternity.
Sparks pirouetted across the place
where synapses are created. Form came
from void.
Bulbs branched from stem
and the synaptic moment
entered the cortex of long term memory.
We were there. Do you remember?

Gretchen Fletcher’s poetry has been published in The Chattahoochee Review, Pacific Coast Journal, Northeast Corridor, Inkwell, Pudding Magazine, Upstreet, Canada’s lichen, and elsewhere. One of Gretchen’s poems won the Poetry Society of America’s Bright Lights, Big Verse competition, and she was projected on the Jumbotron as she read it in Times Square. Her chapbooks, That Severed Cord and The Scent of Oranges, were published by FLP.