Detour

Kathryn Spratt

Neural networks sprawl;
leaves wink and
fall in fewer frames per second
than they fell last year.
I miss a subtle
shift in light as
sight signals detour,

slowing

on a broken road
where leaves rained silhouetted in a streetlight’s ruddy glow,
where I ran with the warmth of a hopeful hand in mine,
lifting my face in that crisp deluge.

Stimuli,
kindly bypass scenic
ruminations—
whether we kissed and
whether we should have kissed—
I need a smooth unspooling of

next

The Science

I wrote this poem after perusing Adrian Bejan's theory that time seems to speed up as we age partly because our brains process experiences in visual frames per second. When impulses travel from our eyes to our cortexes relatively quickly, we perceive life in more frames per second. Events seem fuller and richer; time seems to pass more slowly. As our brains mature, their neural networks become larger and more complex. Consequently, visual signals’ eye-to-cortex journey takes longer. Instead of delivering the rapid-fire moments that endow childhood with long, exquisitely detailed weeks, months, and years, our ageing minds render a comparatively choppy, abbreviated reality. Processing moments in fewer frames per second than we once did, we can't shake the feeling that time--or at least our perception of it--is speeding up.

The Poet

Kathryn Spratt (she/her) teaches high school English in the Western United States. Most recently, she published poetry in Rue Scribe and wrote the lyrics for ‘Winter Lullaby’, a choral piece by Utah composer Christopher Bradford.

Next poem: Do you remember me? by Fatema Nakhuda