Self-Portrait With Hand Microscope

by Lucille Lang Day

Neural Folds

(For John Teton)

The frog embryos spin,
a million tiny skaters
in bright sacs. Soon
neurons will web each body,
spreading fine mesh
through muscle and skin.

First, the neural folds
must fuse. Crest cells
edging a moon-bald field
reach with bulbous arms;
flowing inward, they move
toward each other.

And when they finally meet,
melding together, cell by cell,
there is no explanation:
they know who they are.
I can almost hear them
yammering in strange tongues.

— Lucille Lang Day

From Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, first published in The New York Times Magazine

56 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1982

About the author

LUCILLE LANG DAY is the author of Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of two children's books, Chain Letter and The Rainbow Zoo, and eleven poetry collections and chapbooks, including Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, Becoming an Ancestor, The Curvature of Blue, and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems. Her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. She edited the anthology Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery and coedited Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Great Distinction from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in biological sciences. She also holds an M.A. in zoology and a Ph.D. in science/mathematics education from UC Berkeley, as well as an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. The founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for seventeen years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive museum in Berkeley.