Did any of you, by any chance, follow
the plight of Dava Sobel, a couple of years ago?
She was then a science reporter for The New York
Times, who was volunteered--
I think is the polite way to put this--
to spend a month in a sleep lab having her circadian rhythms
studied.
She was told that she would not have
her job if she didn't do it.
And in truth, all they discovered
was that, left to its own devices,
a body would run on a 25-hour rather than a 24-hour day.
But in order to discover this, they put her into a sleep lab
where there were no windows, no clocks.
There was a large one-way mirror through which she was watched.
She was attached to all kinds of devices.
She said, at one point, that she knew when
they were taking blood samples.
She could feel this very gentle tugging that would go on.
She was not alone even in the bathroom or to sleep, not ever.
And she was not allowed to have things like chocolate,
coffee, letters from friends that
might have dates, newspapers.
Nor was she told when she would be released.
So you can just imagine what this was like.
And she sent out weekly heartbreaking letters
that became progressively more and more desperate, more
and more intense.
And they were published by The New York Times.
I couldn't write to her.
So I wrote her this poem instead.
It's called "Sleeping Beauty of The Bronx."
And it begins with a little quote from The New York Times.
Last Friday, Dava Sobel, science reporter from The New York
Times, entered the human chronophysiology laboratory,
Montefiore Hospital, to begin 25 days as a research subject.
She is cut off from the outside world.
Freed of the constraints of the 24-hour day, her body
is expected to establish its own biological day.
Dearest friend, dead to me by time's present fiction,
I read your plight weekly through the dream
whorl of print, how they pox your face and arms
with high-strung electrodes, chart your blood tides, stint
you sunlight and chocolate.
A pheasant under glass, you are all alone,
yet, never alone enough.
Glad-eyed by a legion of mute observers,
drawn to the oasis of your vital signs.
Even your spine begins lower now with a rectal probe,
in throwback irony, almost a tail.
Eeriest of all, you feel blood samples leached from your veins
at random moments, a quiet tugging.
How can I picture you?
Glass-frail in a glass burrow, neon blazing, and all your life
signs open with only a syringe's steel kiss on your birthday,
yesterday, though you told no one.
Outside, in the fidget and bloom you crave,
summer is like a new philosophy in the air,
crammed with wild strawberries and speckle-throated lilies,
baby garter snakes lying like pencil leads in the grass,
and the pool, a single blue shudder
where mallards bill dip and ceremonially mate.
Sleeping beauty, I read your Times article this morning
and cried.
One day, through no fault of our friendship,
we'll find ourselves asleep apart forever,
betrayed by the green anthem we love
and have plighted our word troth to in such different ways,
exiled to the nightmare we ferry in our cells,
rubbed to silence by the thickening waves.