Last Friday, Dava Sobel, a science reporter from The New York Times, entered the human chronophysiology laboratory of 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.
—The New York Times, June 17, 1980
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 leeched 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
a sleep 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.