After James Dickey

You’re dissecting a brain. A sheep’s brain.
You make a sagittal cut, halving it
like an heirloom tomato. But it’s not
an heirloom tomato. It’s a sheep’s brain, 
and it smells like science. 

You take the left half in your hand. 
You have the urge to casually toss it 
in the air and catch it like a kid fiddling 
with a baseball. But you’re at least trying
to take this seriously, so instead you attempt 
to identify the inner components:

Medula?
Thalamus?
Corpus callosum?

It all looks like one slab of grayness 
to you; a congealed storm-cloud, a stone
gone soft. You leave it to your lab partner
to figure out, the one who didn’t want
to touch the brain, making it your job by default.

You kind of like touching the brain.
It has a nice, subtle heft. 
And, come to think of it, the chemical scent
isn’t half bad—reassuringly sterile, like Lysol.

Strange, to think this organ, 
smaller than your hand
once housed thoughts: eat grass, go baah,
avoid farmer’s teenage son.

What, you wonder, was its final thought,
the culmination of its ovine existence? 
Did it think to itself, 
                                       I can read the stars 
backwards. I can see shapes and colors 
no man could imagine. I have spoken 
with your God, laughed with him 
at the world’s expense. I know,
and do not fear, the beginning, I know 
and do not fear, the end. But you—
you who pry out my brain, 
peer into it with your zero-shaped eyes—
you know only what I let you know,
see only what I let you see; that is, 
                                       the mere surface,
                                       the illusion.