Don’t let’s be unpleased, Doctor, these convulsionscan be undone would have been a romantic thing to say on a shipcrossing the Atlantic some stormy night in 1840 after falling in lovewith the crew doctor and feigning hysterics just to be treated in the dim waveringlight of his cabin. Instead, it was Phillip Lightfoot I kissed that timein the 7th grade when he spent the night with my brother who finallywent to bed and it was apparent Lightfoot was there only to slobberall over my lips and I thought if this is what French kissing is like I’ll just have todeal with this for the rest of my life. This was after 5th-grade-crush-on-Justin who didn’t know I was alive but whose friend Buddy wrote Kristin is Loveon the white toecaps of his converse all-stars the same yearI resolved only to write poems with a timeless deep hidden meaning (TDHM)and shared class with a girl named Laura who while scratchinginky swirls into her desk told me This is My Mind and Cathy at P.E.told everyone she fucked 12 guys and none of us including herhad even kissed a boy, not even Lightfoot. Later I hearda French physiologist had cut off a German Shepherd’s headto see how long it could live without a body, showing his colleaguesthe subsequent flinch in response to a banging hammer and notethe contracted pupils under bright light, the tongue reaching outto lick citric acid from its lips. My idealism surrounding the French kisslived on this way, deprived of sustenance. As the math teacherscribbled Venn diagrams on the board I pictured myselfaboard that ship opening a chest to find instead of treasure,a prop, rudder, a missing starboard plank. I pictured rare birds, parrotsbehind lush palm fronds squawking parrot calls, meaningfulonly to other parrots. From the backseat of Shanna’s carthe mushrooms made everything pass by outside the open windowin high school high speed, eyes fluttering to catch each tree, somerare feathered memoryto unfold years afterward with great depth and conviction.I kept a diary to document important thingsor things that might later be important. The average brain, for example,weighs 1,360 grams and when members of the Society of Mutual Autopsydissected its founder’s brain after waiting for him to die of natural causeswere disappointed his only weighed 1,234 grams and rationalized thisby appealing to old age. This old guynamed Chris who was too old to hang out with college kidsstarted a commune in the backwoods of Tuscaloosa and observed while wecarried ourselves toward great marvels around campfires and made sentencesout of the veins of leaves and from moonlight through trees and coincidences likeI’m an Aquarius and you’re an Aquarius and our rising sign and Oh My Godand where I fell hard for a guy named Jack who sat behind me in the mid-woodsmassage train and later convincingly stroked my hair while we lay naked and post-coitalin the clammy leaves and who weeks later fell in love with a pixiehe met at some music festival and I immediately thought he’s notthat doctor on that ship anyhow and pictured myself opening upa treasure chest to find another smaller treasure chest holdingan even smaller chest and so on until I held between two fingersa tiny chest yet unopened.It wasn’t just the French guywho did this with dogs but the Russians did it too, using anti-coagulants and a primitiveheart-lung machine called the Autojector to keep those heads aliveand everyone in Russia believed one day all we'd need were our heads and whole universitieswould be taught by bodiless professors and they could cut down this wayon the costs of faculty housing. Some things are worth economizing on,Scott once told me on the side of the road in Big Bend where we’d run outof gas and he sat by a cactus shaving shirtless in the sunlight with a smallround mirror and a hunting knife and some things, he said, are not. My friendknows a girl who kept a journal about her one true loveto give him one day when she finally met him and I thought howhopeful and stupid can one girl be and how freaked outthe guy would be reading it. Depending on the oxygen trapped in the braina severed head can live on for 13 seconds and once the heads of two French rivalsbit each other inside the dark burlap bag, each with the particular pleasureof knowing what was coming to them both. Sullen morningsalone I can’t give up the Timeless part but I’m willing to partwith the Deep and the Hidden. I keep thinking of walruses and mongoosesso removed from all of this, I think of great scientiststraversing oceans and knowing what to look for in those dark waters.I think of the wild optimism of Sir John Lubbock who was so sureants communicated by sounds indiscernible to the human earbut so distinct to other ants that he held up a telephone between two anthills and kicked overone to observe any response in the other which there wasnone. This he was able to accept, moving onto other experiments. This he was able to accept, moving on.

___Kristin Marie Kostick is an anthropologist and writer living in Hartford. In recent years she was awarded the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award and the 2004 Long River Review Graduate Creative Writing Award from the University of Connecticut, and the 2002 Thomas Wolfe Award for Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. Her work has appeared in Small Spiral Notebook and the Long River Review. She helps to run (with poet Andrea Henchey) a monthly reading series and open-mic in Hartford called Inescapable Rhythms.