Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

On several occasions I have felt myself drift into a state below consciousness. Once, while driving home after a long night shift, so tired, I drove my car into a tree in Germantown, Philadelphia. In my daze, I had slowed down to 5 miles per hour. Fortunately, only my right fender was dented. The tree and I survived. I remember, on that drive, trying to keep my eyelids open. I tried it all: playing loud music, opening all of the windows, reciting the FASB rule for recognizing profits and losses for real estate sales. (I was still in college then.) No matter my technique, I could not stay awake. It was 1:00am; I had only another five miles home. My eyes dropped and dropped, then, bang!

In another instance, my dentist gave me a sedative just before a procedure. She leaned over me, gave instructions to an assistant. Easy listening music from the eighties played in the background. The doctor’s headlamp faded to a pinpoint, then, total darkness. Hello twilight sleep!

I heard someone say recently that reading a certain author’s poetry was like a siesta. Falling asleep while reading poetry is common, but why some and not others? Is dozing off a verdict, a judgment, of how bad the poetry is? I actually admire the poet’s work, which was likened to attending an orchestral concert: “No matter how hard I listen, I fade and only awaken when everyone applauds.”

We are entitled to dislike an author’s work, but I wonder if that is because we simply are not equipped to appreciate certain aesthetics. I am guilty of disliking a poet’s work; I find myself saying “what was I thinking” when later I find so much to enjoy within it.

Today’s fine poem creates the feeling of a medically induced slumber, but, by working layers of sound, a gorgeous aesthetic tension enlivens my ears.

Transfusion
by Shara Lessley

Through the plastic tube of sleep, you entered,
descending deep, the precipitate 
slope of drift, surfed through the drip—
clear consciousness the whole room released,
white box spinning in the sweat-damp
inning of no-longer awake. Slipping, lids
taxed as snowpack, in the going you felt less
the rush of avalanche than the icy dust
of acquiescence settled and settling.
Blankness of stasis. The mind cruising
an empty avenue, no one at the wheel. Night-
cave-mid-day-half-morning-past-soon, time
to sleep lisped the soup-green glove to syringe, 
molecules of breath floating over your 
plaited crown. You could see them, falling down
and down, like Alice almost drowned (“I shall be 
punished for it now”) into the well of dream,
the anesthetic crypt—and you slept. Slept while
your other self slipped from the case of flesh
to which it was formerly confined and sat, as if
for the first time, upright in the flame-
bright fiberglass chair beside the medical bed
to ride out your shared hiatus, suspense 
thrumming as it watched you, content, snow-
flow entraining the tree of thought, from slush-
rush to blackout, pain’s needled crest
upswept as, into your vein, a scrum of cells
from the plasma-filled bag opened their gilt-
dark eyes and wept, and wept.

"Transfusion" by Shara Lessley. Used by permission of the poet.