The mind is always brewing something, 
tracing shape-shifting menageries in clouds. 
Any plain ingredients—flour, water, 
and a bit of yeast and salt—plus time, 
can rise to the occasion, becoming 
a new thing. So a handful of steel pins 
dropped on a table spurs the mind 
to summon forces far beyond itself, 
as sages once scanned the entrails 
of a bird, thrown sticks, or tea leaves 
at the bottom of a cup for wisdom 
that could change a nation or affect 
a life. What emerges depends upon 
the mind at work. Maybe a strategy 
to solve a city’s traffic woes, a way 
to plan political maneuvers or a play 
in sports. Philosophy and science 
are full of sudden insights of this sort, 
like Newton’s apple, Archimedes 
bending over water rising in a tub. 
The chemist August Kekulé learned 
the benzene molecule’s structure 
from the sudden vision of a snake 
swallowing its tail. In the pandemic, 
when the rules of ordinary life were 
all suspended and time became the most 
plentiful commodity, we could stare at nothing, 
like a cat intent on tracking birds outside 
the window. People looked back on their lives, 
hoping to mend old rifts, contacting 
former friends or enemies, the quarrels 
long forgotten. We changed, like dough 
rising at the back of a warm stove. 
Sequestered in our homes, we braided 
our loose threads into a pattern, wrote 
plays, made a family, discovered special 
gifts we didn’t know we had, found 
power at the tips of our own fingers. 

 

 

—After the photograph by Sal Taylor Kydd:

Watching Pins (photogravure)

Copyrighted © by Sal Taylor Kydd. All rights reserved.
Image appears here with her permission.

 

 

Publisher’s Note:

A bit of background re August Kekulé’s vision:

“Chemistry’s visual origins” (“Vivid imagination was key to unlocking the secrets of molecular structure in the nineteenth century...”), article by Andrew Robinson in Nature (Volume 465, page 36; 2010); link retrieved on 17 December 2023:
https://www.nature.com/articles/465036a

“In Image and Reality, Alan Rocke covers Kekulé’s work, varied life and personality, and locates the chemist’s thinking in the context of developing ideas about chemical bonding and molecular structure. [...]

“Some historians have suggested that Kekulé stole the credit for discovering benzene’s structure from his contemporaries, notably the Scottish chemist Archibald Couper and Austrian scientist Josef Loschmidt, by fabricating a story of two daydreams he had about whirling carbon atoms forming chains, ‘twisting and turning like snakes.’ In a 1985 paper, Rocke offered a brilliant refutation of these allegations. Using archival evidence, he argued that the concept of carbon tetravalency and the benzene ring developed cautiously and logically in Kekulé’s mind during 1854–65. The two daydreams were integral episodes: the first in the summer of 1855 on top of a London omnibus, the second in 1862 in his apartment in Ghent, Belgium, while Kekulé was writing a pioneering chemistry textbook.”

Sal Taylor Kydd

is originally from the UK, earned her BA degree in Modern Languages from Manchester University, and has an MFA in Photography from Maine Media College.

Her photographs have been exhibited across the world, including New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Mexico, and Spain. Sal is also a writer and poet, and has published books combining these two art forms. Her books are in private and museum collections throughout the country, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Bowdoin College, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Franklin Furnace Artist Books Collection, and the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England.

Sal’s latest book, Yesterday, published in October of 2021, is a limited-edition book of photographs made during the pandemic.

Further details are available at the Page Gallery.

Robbi Nester

lives and writes in Southern California, where she is a retired college educator and an elected member of the Academy of American Poets. She hosts two virtual poetry series each month and is the author of four published books of poetry, including an ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections: Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014).

Her poems, reviews, essays, and articles have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including among others: Artemis; Book of Matches; Cultural Daily; Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic (Kent State University Press, 2022); SMEOP (Hot) (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, forthcoming); Live Encounters; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Mindfull; Naugatuck River Review; Rhino; One Art; The Journal of Radical Wonder; Tiferet; Valparaiso Poetry Journal; Verse-Virtual; and Zooanthology: About the Animals in Our Lives (Sweetycat Press, 2022).

Robbi has also edited three anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014); Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees, which was published as a special issue of Poemeleon Journal; and The Plague Papers, published online at Poemeleon Journal.

Poet’s website: www.robbinester.net

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Dancing White Egret, ekphrastic poem by Robbi Nester after a photograph by Philippe Rouyer, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022)

⚡ After Blossom, ekphrastic poem after an etching by Phil Greenwood in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 3, May 2020)

⚡ In Memory, five poems by Robbi Nester in Live Encounters (August 2021)

⚡ Three Poems in Verse-Virtual (January 2020)

⚡ Law of Attraction, ekphrastic poem after Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone, in Verse-Virtual (May 2019)

⚡ Night Tunnel, ekphrastic poem after a painting by Robert Rhodes, Philadelphia Night Train, in The Ekphrastic Review (21 April 2016)