how is it the mind can recall a song, lyrics, melody, pitch maybe, from the moment we hear it even if it might be decades since we heard the piece last.

this evening i caught a bit of an interview on national public radio with a brain researcher and musicologist about the evolution of music within our species.

we have a biological need for music it seems. and by extension, i would also include poetry. not that i'm a guild man nor do i liken poetry to song -- exactly.

but like music, poetry i think lights up many parts of the brain at once. how else would you account for its deep pleasure giving and intellectual stimulating and genitals heating up.

even more, poetry is the language speaking as it speaks thru the human voice. logos is what i'm talking about. in the beginning was the word and the word made flesh.

language is not music, but poetry might be. it also might be film too.

which might explain why i'm attracted to poetry that reads like a film with a lot of editing. often i recall just moments from film, but sometimes whole films too. some movies i can almost replay in my head from start to finish. but mostly i recall bits and pieces.

there is one film i saw at mather auto movies, a long-defunct drive-in, the chinese connection starring bruce lee, when i was a pup. the scene i remember the most is when lee humiliates one of the bad guys by taking a part of scroll of calligraphy from a broken picture frame, sweeping off the shards of glass, and making the bad guy eat his words.

that what stands out is an image of eating language, hungering for words. i am haunted by that image of film. it was, perhaps by a longshot, but it was just the same, my first lesson in poetry.