Synapse

In its only concert appearances of the season, UCSF’s a cappella group, Vocal Chords, will be performing a new and eclectic mix of pop music on campus next month.

“There was this liii-yit,” she says, with her Southern accent lingering on the “iii” as if a boomerang going round and round, away and back again, trying to find its way home.  “I mean I think it was a liii-yit.”  Her eyes searching the sky overhe

You wonder if they ever really existed

because how can anything

exist so briefly,

like putting a lighter to incense

at dusk and letting go before it lights,

watching faint smoke vanish

These are my thoughts. Be honest.

If we get to exist together in a different

plane, do you find that sad, like I do? Here

I am growing older and more tolerant. But

sometimes I wish a whisper would come

after the rain           a trace of smoke

          tinting the air          sliver of twilight

street lights              glistening

          on the road              a red car

speeds past              where

I remembered reading in one of my mother’s medical textbooks that back when medicine was first beginning to chart the dark expanses of the human body, enterprising men would dredge up the dearly and recently departed to sell to medical schools for

过香积寺 - 王维

不知香积寺， 数里入云峰。

古木无人径， 深山何处钟。

泉声咽危石， 日色冷青松。

薄暮空潭曲， 安禅制毒龙。

Going Right Past the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance

Wang Wei

I should have known from the way I saw him driving.

Got a long incubation time to kill? Waiting for your cells to spin? Bored in-between classes? In class?  Now, PhD Comics is a well-worn rite of passage for graduate students around the world.