Strange Little Prophets

When is the smell of a blackberry tree

a harbinger of  violent movement

rather than simply the recollection of

a childhood Sunday dress hem-dipped

in mud, handprinted with juice and seeds?

Hard to say. A mind, when playing tricks

is at its most sincere — at home raking

through the body’s history, repeating

the strange and nostalgic. The taste of

dirty copper, the imagined cockroach

in the corner, the sluggish slow of  the clock

 — doctors call these strange little prophets

warning signs of a seizure, synaptic misfires

looming like a song discordant, until the body

 — an unplucked string — is finally strummed.