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.
Music in its many forms is an important complementary healing modality. Programs such as MusiCorps aid wounded veterans in recovering from the trauma of war; world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma speaks often of music’s therapeutic power. No wonder countless physicians are also accomplished musicians. With its emphasis on language’s musical qualities, ranging from percussive spoken word to metrical formal verse, poetry also harbors a comparable healing potential. In “The Survivors,” we experience how music heals in both these vernaculars, first in its overt depiction of a piano concerto played in a hospital lobby, and then expressed in the measured, syllabic stanzas of the poem itself (that call to mind the stanzaic structure of another poem linking music and healing, John Donne’s “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness”). Music’s capacity for connecting us, thus soothing suffering’s isolation, is more than our immersion in Chopin’s mellifluence, but is further illustrated by the poem’s central image of an audience of both patients and passersby gathered in a circle around the performer, himself a former patient. That music and poetry can somehow both contain and unlock intense emotions is dramatized in the pianist’s fingers flying across the keys, and felt in the sound created, as “…liberating, like/White birds mixed with black, a fierce flock/Of notes into the hospital’s vaulted lobby.” As the poem concludes, we realize that we are all “the survivors” of the poem’s title, joined, like Joshua and those drawn to hear his performance, in the universal struggle to confront our shared mortality.
