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Not Nothing

1955 –

A map on tissue. A mass of wire. Electricity of the highest order.
Somewhere in this live tangle, scientists discovered—

like shipmates on the suddenly-round earth—
a new catalog of synaptic proteins

presenting how memory is laid down:
At the side of the transmitting neuron

an electrical signal arrives and releases chemical packets.

What I had imagined as “nothing” are a bunch of conversing
squirts
remaking flat into intimate.

Kimiko Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York.

About Kimiko Hahn

Themes

Science

About this Poem

“At bedtime when my mother read Rudyard Kipling’s ‘How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin,’ I giggled every time she reached the final sentence: ‘But the Parsee came down from his palm-tree, wearing his hat, from which the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour, packed up his cooking-stove, and went away in the direction of Orotavo, Amygdala, the Upland Meadows of Anantarivo, and the Marshes of Sonaput.’ The place names tickled. I loved them. And years later, I realized that this love, this adoration of sound, was instrumental in my love for what words could do even if one didn’t know what the words actually meant and especially if the words could offer many meanings—like the word ‘tissue’ in ‘Not Nothing,’ a poem triggered by the Nicholas Wade article ‘Brainpower May Lie in Complexity of Synapses.’ Later, Japanese and my studies of Japanese would form this adoration into a sensibility and then an aesthetic (which I’ve written about in my book Brain Fever). So my earliest exposure to words, whether English, Italian (a whole other story) or Japanese, really did affect my sense of delight and magic. From another line in the story, “[The cake] was indeed a Superior Comestible (that’s magic),” in my five-year-old mind, I thought Kipling meant that the word ‘comestible’ was magic. Many of my poems, begin with a word or specific diction. And for me, the language of science has an abiding exotic feel much the same way that the subcontinent of India might be for an Englishman in the 19th century. This is where ‘the Parsee’ has led me—to the brain and the imagination. Oriental? The irony is not lost on me!”
—Kimiko Hahn

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More by this poet

[The whale already]

^{a golden shovel}

^{The whale already taken got away: the moon alone
—Yosa Buson, translated by Hiroaki Sato}

Kimiko Hahn

2022

Things That Are Changed—March, 2020

A bandana. A cardinal. An apple

No. 2 lead pencil—the mechanical pencil, now empty—appears more vivid

A box of toothpicks—now that I'm baking bran muffins

Kimiko Hahn

2020

To a No. 2 Yellow Pencil on May 1, 2020

To see you is to smell
your wood and lead shavings
that spill from the gray
metal pencil sharpener
nailed to the window sill
in Mrs. Rote's classroom—
all these decades ago. Today,
my mechanical one, empty,

Kimiko Hahn

2020

Poems

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Not Nothing

More by this poet

[The whale already]

Things That Are Changed—March, 2020

To a No. 2 Yellow Pencil on May 1, 2020

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