What matters most is private and vast and can’t be seen
on the brain scan, though it may burn orange or blue
or a toasty gold in the amygdala,
a magnolia-green in the cingulum, the cinnamon
or burnt wine of an old tin roof all through the fornix.
For the story only you know, the day is coming
when someone has found out how to read
each synapse, how to extract your past and play it back
like a movie, for anyone to see, but even then—
and this makes me laugh—there will have to be an angle
of witness, like a seat in the audience, and all
anyone will see from there, as always, is what they can.
It’s once upon a time, still, but the soul of what follows
glows the color of chance, and who knows
how holy it is?